I always cringe when I hear someone refer to America as a democracy. If it weren’t for the electoral college, a candidate could win 48 states by 100,000 votes each, lose by 2.5 million votes each in California and New York, and lose the election by 200,000 votes.
With the current state-by-state winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes, it could only take winning a bare plurality of popular votes in the 11 most populous states, containing 56% of the population of the United States, for a candidate to win the Presidency with a mere 26% of the nation’s votes!