Donald Trump passed 270 electoral college votes hours after polls closed, but Hillary Clinton emerged with more popular votes, and three days on, her lead is still growing. This is how that works, and when it's happened before.
At the time of writing, Clinton led the popular vote by nearly 400,000 votes, with millions of ballots likely to favour her still to be counted.
The 2016 US presidential race will go down in history for many reasons as a truly extraordinary election.
Although the final vote tallies are not yet in, the indications are that Hillary Clinton will become the fifth presidential candidate to lose the election despite winning the popular vote.
For those of you not familiar with the intricacies of the US system of electing a president, it's a two-step process. Each state is worth a set number of electoral college votes. In most states, the winner of the popular ballot gets all that state's electoral college votes (unless members of the electoral college choose not to vote for them – but let's not get into that for the moment).
There are currently 538 available electoral college votes. The would-be president needs to secure 270 of these to win. At the time of writing Clinton was on track to lose by 74 electoral college votes (final results for New Jersey and Michigan are not yet in), despite being ahead in the popular vote ...
The last time the electoral applecart was upset in this fashion was in 2000. In controversial circumstances George W Bush took Florida, allowing him to reach the 270 vote target – just. He secured 271 electoral college votes to Al Gore's 266 (one elector abstained from casting an electoral vote for the latter).
Prior to that election, it had been 112 years since another Republican candidate, Benjamin Harrison, secured a majority of electoral college ballots while losing the popular vote.
It was (yet another) Republican who this system first advantaged in 1876: Rutherford B Hayes won out by just one electoral college vote, despite more than 250,000 fewer ballots being cast for him than his main opponent, Samuel J Tilden.
Arguably the strangest happening of all, however, was in 1824, when John Quincy Adams won the presidency even though Andrew Jackson had received more popular votes and more electoral votes. Because none of the candidates in the race reached the required number of electoral college votes, the decision was left to the House of Representatives, which opted for Adams.
The Guardian.uk
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