America's Voting System

Have you ever felt like your vote didn’t really matter in the election? If so, you’re not alone. Millions of Americans every year choose not to vote and for many of them it’s because they don’t think their vote matters. They may be right! Even many of the votes that are cast each year end up having no bearing, and it’s because of the way America’s voting system is set up. In the US we use a system called the electoral college. It’s based on electors who are selected by the political parties in each state. When election day comes each elector, 538 in total, casts their vote for who will be the president. Most of the time this vote is cast in the direction of the popular vote their state, but not always. There are rules stating whom an elector has to vote for. Some electors may take
Now you might say that it’s ok because there’s still the popular vote, but the popular vote doesn’t actually matter when it comes to electing the president.
Four presidents in the history of the United States have lost the popular vote and still won thanks to the electoral college. In the 1876 election Rutherford Hayes won the electoral college, but it was actually a lesser known man by the name of Samuel Tilden who won the popular vote. He captured almost 36,000 more votes, but none of them mattered. Another example of this is the 1888 election. Grover Cleveland captured almost 100,000 more votes, but he still lost the electoral votes by a large margin of 233 to 168. So that’s yet another 100,000 votes with absolutely no bearing on what happened in the election. The most recent example and by far the biggest margin the popular vote was in the 2000 election. Al Gore