This is the version of the Electoral College built for whoever has to explain it next. There are 538 total electors -- one for each of a state's House seats plus its two senators -- and 270 wins. Forty-eight states award all their electors to whoever wins the state; Maine (since 1972) and Nebraska (since 1992) split theirs by congressional district instead. Because every state gets two electors just for having two senators regardless of population, the weighting isn't even: Wyoming's 588,753 people share 3 electors (1 per roughly 196,000 residents), while California's roughly 39.5 million people share 54 electors (1 per roughly 731,000 residents) -- a Wyoming vote carries about 3.7 times the electoral weight of a California one. That weighting has let the popular-vote loser become president five times in US history, twice recently and by very different margins: Bush beat Gore in 2000 by just 5 electoral votes despite losing the popular vote by 537,000, and Trump beat Clinton in 2016 by 77 electoral votes while losing the popular vote by 2.8 million. Electors aren't robots, either -- most states can now legally fine or replace ones who break their pledge, a rule the Supreme Court upheld unanimously in 2020. And if no candidate reaches 270 at all, the House decides among the top three, with each state delegation casting exactly one vote regardless of population -- Wyoming's single representative equal to California's 52. It has happened exactly once, in 1824, when John Quincy Adams became president despite Andrew Jackson winning more of both the popular and the electoral vote.