The US election was closer than you think
Updated
On first look, the US election looks like a Trump landslide. But looks can be deceiving.
The electoral college vote as it stands has Donald Trump at 279 votes — nine votes above the magic number of 270 needed to claim the presidency.
With another 26 expected from the states of Michigan and Arizona, Mr Trump's total will be 306.
His opponent Hillary Clinton, by contrast, currently has 228, with an expected four votes from New Hampshire bringing her total to 232.
So the count and every electoral college map appear as a sea of red — but the numbers tell a different story.
Clinton won the popular vote
Mrs Clinton may not have won the majority of electoral votes, but more Americans across the nation voted for her than voted for Mr Trump, according to the latest count.
It doesn't look like a big difference but if the vote were conducted on a national level, Mrs Clinton would have won by a margin of more than 200,000 votes.
The electoral map looks like a sea of red as it stands, but this is because Democrats tend to win more densely populated, delegate-rich states, while Republicans win geographically larger, less populous states.
So if more Americans voted for Mrs Clinton, how is Mr Trump now President-elect?
Blame the electoral college
The electoral college system is enshrined in the US Constitution, and was initially established by the founding fathers as a compromise between those who wanted the president to be elected by popular vote and those who wanted congress to elect the president.
The system allocates each state a certain number of votes, based on the number of seats each state has in Congress.
California, for example, has 53 seats in the lower house, plus the two senators which are allocated to each state, meaning it gets 55 votes in the electoral college.
The only exception is Washington DC, which has no congressional representation but is given three votes.
The winner of the popular vote in each state is awarded all of the state's electoral college votes, with the exception of Maine and Nebraska, which award two of their votes to the popular vote winner, and the rest to the winners of their congressional districts.
This means that it doesn't matter if Mrs Clinton won by almost 2.5 million votes in California, or that Mr Trump won by almost a million votes in Texas — the number of electoral college votes awarded would be the same as if they had won by one vote.
Mr Trump has won smaller vote margins in the states, but he has won states rich in electoral college votes, such as Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio, which helped him reach the magic number of 270.
So how close was it really?
Assuming New Hampshire is counted for Mrs Clinton, she would need at least another 36 electoral college votes to claim the presidency.
A combination of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin would have put Mrs Clinton in the White House, and it turns out the combined margin in those states was just 107,330 votes.
Here's how that figure comes about.
The graph below shows the swing states (including states that were likely before the election to go one way or the other, or states which were considered to be safe Democrat states but flipped to Republican) and the margin of votes separating Mrs Clinton and Mr Trump.
This graph shows the combinations of swing states which would have delivered victory to Mrs Clinton, with the total margin of votes between them.
How often does this happen?
This is the fifth time in US history that the candidate who won the electoral college vote did not win the popular vote.
It happened three times in the 19th century, but the most recent incident occurred in 2000, when George Bush won the electoral college by two votes, but lost the popular vote by 540,520 votes.
That election was controversial, due to a Supreme Court decision regarding a recount in Florida, which awarded that state's electoral votes to Mr Bush.
But Australia is not immune to this kind of anomaly — in 1998 our Westminster-style democracy delivered prime minister John Howard 80 seats in the Lower House to opposition leader Kim Beazley's 67 seats, despite the Labor Party beating the Coalition in the nationwide two-party preferred popular vote 50.98 per cent to 49.02 per cent.
Analysing Australian elections dating back to 1949 shows that this also happened at the 1990, 1969, 1961 and 1954 elections.
Despite this, there are no calls in Australia to change the system, while in the US the electoral college receives widespread criticism, including this tweet from 2012:
Ironically, it just put him in the White House.
Topics: us-elections, world-politics, united-states
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