No country still uses an electoral college − except the US

By Joshua Holzer, Westminster College Every four years, Congress gathers to count electoral votes. AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite The United States is the only democracy in the world where a presidential candidate can get the most popular votes and still lose the election. Thanks to the Electoral College, that has happened five times in the country’s history. The most recent examples are from 2000, when Al Gore won the popular vote but George W. Bush won the Electoral College after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, and 2016, when Hillary Clinton got more votes nationwide than Donald Trump but lost in the Electoral College. The Founding Fathers did not invent the idea of an electoral college. Rather, they borrowed the concept from Europe, where it had been used to pick emperors for hundreds of years. As a scholar of presidential democracies around the world, I have studied how countries have used electoral colleges. None have been satisfied with the results. And except for the U.S., all have found other ways to choose their leaders. The Holy Roman Empire had seven electors: Three were members of the Catholic Church and four were significant members of the nobility. This image depicts, from left,...