How is it possible that a candidate could win the popular vote and not be elected president?

Answer 1

The president is actually electors by electors chosen from each state and not by popular vote. Most states award their electors in a winner-take-all basis; the leading vote-getter in the state gets all the electoral votes . Therefore a candidate can win by huge majorities in the states he wins and lose by narrow margins in the states he loses and so pile up a majority of popular votes.

Answer 2

The "winner-takes-all" method of appointing electors, which is practiced by 96% of the states, is what makes it possible.

If, for example, a state has ten votes, and 50% of the voters of the state voted for Candidate A, 40% voted for Candidate B, and 10% voted for Candidate C, in the winner-takes-all system, Candidate A gets 100% of the state's ten votes, and Candidates B and C get 0. About 99% of the electors, 533 out of 538, are selected based on the popular vote of their entire state. (Each of the other five are selected based on the popular vote within a different congressional district.)

A common scenario for the winner not having the most popular votes is when, in a close election, the winner won several of the states with the most electoral votes by a slim margin, while the one with the most popular votes had strong support in many small states.

The most extreme case possible would be for the winning candidate to win the 11 largest states by just one vote each and get no votes at all in the other 39 and DC. That would give the winner just over 25% and the loser 75% of the popular vote- not likely but theoretically possible.

Answer 3

If a few heavily populated states - say, New York, Illinois and California - had VERY high turnout for Candidate A, taking like 70-80% of the popular vote, but Candidate B took many of the smaller states by closer votes - say, 55% or 45% - then Candidate B could easily win the election on the Electoral College vote.

We American citizens don't vote for President. Instead, we vote for Electors in the Electoral College. The vote that counts is the Electoral College vote, and that's a good thing. Otherwise, a few big cities with lots of people could be making stupid decisions that would anger the people living everywhere else in the country.

It's already that way, to some extent; look at the voting results by county, and you can already see that 80% of the rural counties went for Romney, and only the cities went for Obama.

Answer 4

The electoral college decides who becomes the president - not the populate vote.

Answer 5

they can lose the electoral college vote if the representatives and senators in the electoral college feel that the candidate should not win their state over in the election.