The outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election shocked the world when businessman Donald Trump defeated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton despite the fact that Trump received almost 3 million fewer national votes than Clinton. This triggered the public to shine the spotlight on a unique American voting mechanism that has been controversial since its inception, the Electoral College. In this paper, I will first provide a background on the system of the Electoral College. Then, I will dive into the principles behind electoral inversion, the so-called incident when a candidate wins the electoral majority but fails to win the national popular vote. I will then compare and contrast the allocation of power employed by this unique process with that employed by the direct popular vote system, a mechanism for which many people advocate in the wake of 2016. As outlined in the U.S. Constitution, during presidential elections, instead of voting directly for the candidates themselves, citizens vote for electors known collectively as the Electoral College. Nowadays these electors are pledged and consequently expected to vote for the candidates they represent. The Constitution assigns each state a number of electors equaling to the number of seats it has in Congress: currently, there are a total of 538 electors …show more content…
Presidential Elections. In this case, whoever wins the most popular votes, regardless of which state each vote comes from, carries the election. In fact, the direct popular vote system already exists in the state level for the election of members of the House of Representatives. Variations of this system also exist, such as the two-round system employed by the French Presidential Elections. In this way, the issue with winner-take-all or imperfect apportionment effects would then cease to