It is not easy to believe that the example in the first paragraph, a man who did not receive the majority of the popular vote becoming President, could ever happen, but the truth of the matter is that it already has. According to Blight, Chudacoff, Escott, Katzman, Norton, Patterson, and Tuttle, in 1824 John Quincy Adams became President of the United States despite only receiving a mere 30.5 percent of the vote. He ran against Henry Clay, William H. Crawford and Andrew Jackson. Blight, Chudacoff, Escott, Katzman, Norton, Patterson, and Tuttle also state that Clay and Crawford each gained 13 percent of the vote and that Jackson won over 43 percent of the popular vote. It is obvious that Jackson should have won the election, but he did not. He did not win, because he did not get enough electoral votes since the votes were split between four persons. The decision went to the Congress, and Jackson ended up losing the race. As demonstrated in the previous paragraph, the winner of the nation-wide popular vote may not be elected as the President. The candidate that wins the majority of electoral votes across the country becomes the next President. Figure 2 is a map of the states and the number of electoral votes each state has. In order to become President, a candidate must secure over half of the vote. That means that a candidate needs 270 electoral votes. With the current system, a candidate could secure 270 vote by winning the popular vote in a mere eleven states: California, New York, Texas, Florida Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Virginia. If a candidate were to win those eleven states by a very small margin but lost all of the other states by a huge margin, that person would become the next President, even though he would have come nowhere near winning the majority of the popular vote across the country.With the proposal presented earlier, it would be almost impossible for the exampl...
