The United States is a representative democracy. This means that during national elections, the country’s next president and vice president are not selected by the public. Instead, elected officials representing citizens of each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia (which is treated like a state) cast their votes for president. This process is known as the electoral college, and it has become an increasingly controversial political tradition in America.

The electoral college is a relatively straightforward process. Each state is assigned a number of electoral votes, or electors, based on how many people live in the state. California has the most electors at 54, followed by Texas at 40, while Alaska, Delaware, and the District of Columbia have just three electoral votes. During a presidential election, each state holds a state-wide election. In most cases, whichever candidate wins the popular vote claims the state’s electoral votes, though in Maine and Nebraska electors may be split among two or more candidates.

There are a total of 538 electoral votes. This means that a presidential candidate must secure at least 270 electors in order to win a national election. The initial electoral college proposal was passed by Congress in 1787. There were a number of reasons elected officials supported the electoral college more than two centuries ago, but politicians feared a direct presidential election for two primary reasons.

First, the distribution of electoral votes prevents states with a large population from overshadowing smaller states. Although larger states carry more electors, the college makes it impossible for a candidate to single out big states and ignore the citizen’s of smaller states without putting their campaign at significant risk. Second, the electoral college was designed to present undue influence from small groups or foreign influence.

Many voters in modern times reject the reasoning behind the electoral college. A Pew Research Center poll in 2022 found that 63 percent of Americans felt there was a stronger alternative to the electoral college, up from 55 percent the year prior. The issue for most Americans is the fact that a president can be elected despite not having the support of the majority of Americans.

There have been five instances of a president winning the election despite losing the popular vote. This first occurred in 1824 with John Quincy Adams, who is one of two presidents to initially lose both the electoral vote and the popular vote. The four-candidate election was first called in favor of Andrew Jackson, thought to have won a plurality of the popular and electoral votes. However, Jackson was 32 electors shy of a majority, meaning the vote went to the House of Representatives. Candidate Henry Clay was removed from consideration at this stage, but as speaker of the house he manipulated the process to elect Adams, who in turn named Clay his secretary of state.

Rutherford B. Hayes similarly failed to achieve a majority of electors over Samuel Tilden during the 1876 election. Tilden had the popular vote, while 20 electors remained in dispute. The Federal Electoral Commission was created to resolve the dispute, ultimately awarding all 20 votes to Hayes for a narrow and controversial 185 to 184 victory.

Prior to 2000, the 1888 election of Benjamin Harrison was the most recent instance of a president winning an election without winning the popular vote. Like the previous elections, the race between Harrison and Grover Cleveland was characterized by corruption, including a purported Republican plot to buy voters while simultaneously disrupting the opposition’s bribery plots. Cleveland ultimately won the popular vote by a margin of 90,000, but lost the electoral vote 233 to 168.

The 2000 and 2016 presidential elections fueled the fire in terms of modern voters questioning the purpose of the electoral college. In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote by about half a million votes, but George Bush claimed Florida in controversial fashion, allowing for a 271 to 266 victory. Donald Trump’s win over Hillary Clinton was even more controversial: Clinton won the popular vote by a comfortable 2.8 million, but a series of narrow Trump victories in key territories resulted in a 304 to 227 electoral college win.