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However, candidates have failed to get the most votes in the nationwide popular vote in a presidential election and still won. In the 1824 election, Jackson won the popular vote, but no one received a majority of electoral votes. According to the Twelfth Amendment, the House must choose the president out of the top three people in the election.
The popular vote helps determine how many electoral votes each candidate gets. It is not meant to determine who the majority of the country wants, but rather, who each state wants as president.
All states currently choose presidential electors by popular vote. As of 2020, eight states [d] name the electors on the ballot. Mostly, the "short ballot" is used. The short ballot displays the names of the candidates for president and vice president, rather than the names of prospective electors. [125]
In a United States presidential election, the popular vote is the total number or the percentage of votes cast for a candidate by voters in the 50 states and Washington, D.C.; the candidate who gains the most votes nationwide is said to have won the popular vote.
In 2016, though Trump won the presidency, Clinton clinched the popular vote by 2.9 million votes, according to a USA TODAY report. Biden won the popular vote and electoral vote in 2020 with ...
The process was established in the U.S. Constitution as a compromise between having citizens choose directly and a vote in Congress. Each state's number of electoral votes is based on its number ...
A presidential candidate must win a majority of the 538 total electoral votes to win (the District of Columbia gets three). Most states use a winner-take-all system in which all electors award their votes to the popular winner in the state. Maine and Nebraska are the exceptions, awarding theirs on a proportional basis.
Elections in the United States are held for government officials at the federal, state, and local levels. At the federal level, the nation's head of state, the president, is elected indirectly by the people of each state, through an Electoral College. Today, these electors almost always vote with the popular vote of their state.