The 2016 election is over and the results are in: 65,844,954 to 62,979,879. Those are the respective vote totals for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. She received almost 3 million more votes than he, and yet on January 20, it will be Trump who takes the oath of office as our 45th president. Depending on how you voted, you can thank or curse the Electoral College for that outcome. This, of course, was not the first time a President won office despite receiving fewer votes than his nearest opponent. It’s happened four other times: 1824 (J.Q. Adams), 1876 (Hayes), 1888 (B. Harrison), and 2000 (G.W. Bush).

There is something counterintuitive about a system that lets a candidate with fewer votes prevail over one with more votes. And yet, the Founding Fathers undoubtedly had their reasons for creating this system. My purpose in this essay is to not defend or assail the Electoral College, but rather to examine some key questions that would arise if the U.S. scrapped it and elected its President by popular vote alone. I will also look at a way to keep the Electoral College while almost eliminating the possibility of electing a President who lost the popular vote.

Changing how we elect our President would require the adoption of a Constitutional amendment, a usually lengthy process. In any case, besides eliminating the Electoral College, the amendment would have to address two critical questions: Do we want the President to be elected by popular vote? If so, must he or she have a majority of all the votes cast or merely have more votes than any other candidate in the race?

If we go with the latter, then we will be creating a system where the winning candidate will still often have less than half of all the votes cast. That’s because third party candidates, despite having no chance of winning, sometimes capture enough votes to prevent either major party candidate from achieving a majority That was the case in 2016. Although Hillary Clinton was the top vote getter, she only won 48.2. percent of all the votes cast (Trump won 46.1 percent).  The popular vote totals of several Post-World War II Presidents also fell below 50 percent.

If the amendment requires the President to be elected by a majority of the voters, it will have to make provision for a run-off election if no candidate receives a majority the first time. Besides the added expense a run-off election would entail, it would further tax the patience (and perhaps the sanity) of voters, especially if the first election was as toxic as the one we just endured.

Perhaps before discarding the Electoral College, we should see if it can be improved. I think it can. The problem with the college is the winner-take-all format that 48 states have. If you win Florida by 1 million votes, you walk away with its 29 electoral votes. Win it by 100 votes, and you still get those 29 electoral votes, despite your razor-thin margin. This is why Hillary Clinton lost the election despite winning the popular vote. She won big states such as California and New York by huge margins while Trump just barely beat her in some of the big states (e.g., Michigan) that wound up in his column.

Suppose we kept the Electoral College but did away with the winner-take-all provision. Two states — Maine and Nebraska — have already done this. They award their electoral votes according to the Congressional District Method. Under this system, the state gives one electoral vote to each of its congressional districts. The top vote winner in each district receives its electoral vote. The winner of the statewide vote receives the remaining two electoral votes. So if Candidate A wins Nebraska’s first and second districts narrowly and Candidate B wins the third district decisively as well as the statewide total, the electoral votes would be distributed as follows: Candidate A, two votes; Candidate B, three votes. To be sure, this method doesn’t eliminate the possibility of a candidate winning the popular vote but losing the electoral vote, but makes it less likely. I haven’t done the math, but I suspect that if all 50 states used the Congressional District Method, Hillary Clinton would be our next President. She would have won more electoral votes in large states that went for Trump than he would have won in large states that went for Clinton.

Of course, with or without the Electoral College, the 2016 election proved to be a painfully nasty and divisive experience. To some extent, I believe it exposed the rudeness and lack of civility that permeates our culture today.  My February 5 blog will deal with that issue.

 Sources: www.cnn.com/election/results/president, www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/presidential-election-facts, The Center for Voting and Democracy.