The byzantine Electoral College system has, five separate times since America began, delivered the White House to a candidate who lost the popular vote.
The Founding Fathers established the Electoral College at 1787’s Constitutional Convention, lifting the concept from the Holy Roman Empire, which established the method in the year 962, to choose emperors. The move inspired a number of other countries to borrow the concept for their own presidential selection processes. Colombia was first, adopting its own electoral college in 1821, followed by Chile (1828), and Argentina (1853), Finland (1925), and France (1958).
