What are the difference between Electoral vote and Popular vote?

Washington, Nov 04: The Electoral College is not really a place. It is a process that was created in 1787 as a compromise between the election of a president by members of Congress and the election of a president by qualified citizens, and according to the Brennan Center for Justice in part because the Founding Fathers were uncomfortable with giving power to the people.

The Electoral College was imposed to empower the white south in times of slavery. Presently, it is still seen as a flawed system; contrary to the 'one person, one vote' principle of democracy.

How does the Electoral College work?

It can be seen that the Electoral College has 538 members. To be elected as a president, a candidate must win at least half plus one; or 270 electoral votes.

Each state is awarded the same number of college "electors" as it has representatives in Congress, or the House and the Senate combined. Every state has two votes for its Senators plus a number of votes equal to the number of its Congressional districts.

These two Senate additional votes effectively triple the voting power of the smallest states, while having only a negligible impact on the voting power of large states.

The electors, following the election, vote for the presidential candidate; guided by the winning popular vote across the state. This year the electoral college electors' vote will take place on December 14. So when you vote in a general election you are in fact voting for your candidate's preferred electors.

Every states apart from Maine and Nebraska have a 'winner-take-all' policy where the state looks only at the overall winner of the state-wide popular vote, as opposed to proportional representation.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, nearly 3 million more votes nationally than Donald Trump, but because Trump secured 77 more electors than Clinton, in part due to narrow Trump victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (in total 77,744 votes), he still won the presidency.

The reason this was possible is that the number of Electoral College members match the number of state's members of congress, and these are not representative. The number of congressmen assigned to each state in the House of Representatives hasn't changed for over a century, so that today there are is one voting member for every 747,000 Americans; more than triple the original ratio.

However, this elector-to-voter ratio is an average. The real flaw in the system is that it varies wildly from state-to-state. Meaning that individual voters in some states hold a huge amount more real power than others. Voters in Wyoming have nearly four times as much influence as Californians do, for instance.