Electoral Collage

We live in the United States of America which is a democracy. We elect our President, there's no king or queen. What if I told you that technically the people don't actually elect our President. Here's how we elect the President. We use the electoral collage system. It is based on each state and the majority of that state. Each state has a different amount of voters that vote for what the majority is in each state. It's kind of like the House of Representatives because each state's amount is based on population.

This is a map of the election of 2008. States that Obama won are blue and states that McCain won are blue.

In order to become President you need to get a majority of the electoral votes cast. In the election of 1824 there were 4 candidates Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and William Crawford. Jackson had the most popular and electoral votes, but none of them won the majority of electoral votes so it went to the House of Representatives. The House picked Adams. A weird thing about this system is that you don't need to have the most popular votes to win the election. On many occasions the President had less popular votes then their opponent. We have a very strange system of electing our President. Do you think that our system for electing the President is weird?