No, it happened 4 times prior to 2016.
Prior to the 2016 election, there were four times in US history when a candidate won the presidency despite losing the popular vote: 1824 (John Quincy Adams over Andrew Jackson), 1876 (Rutherford B. Hayes over Samuel Tilden), 1888 (Benjamin Harrison over Grover Cleveland), and 2000 (George W. Bush over Al Gore).
There were very good reasons why the electoral college was used to pick the President. I think the most important one ensuring representation from all parts of the country and not the densely populated ones. The Founding Fathers did not want the majority to rule while drowning out the voices of the minority.
In order for any candidate to win the Presidency, they must win electoral votes from rural areas which would be totally ignored if they were picked by popular vote. There would be no need for these people like farmers to be heard for the Presidency would be only decided in high populated city areas. That is not democratic and the Founding Fathers wanted every person's vote to count, not just the majority.
Hamilton stated that the Electoral College was not perfect but the perfect system for fairness in electing a President. The fact that it's very rare for the President to not win both the electoral college and the popular vote proves it's working. Only five times have they not been in agreement.
The Founding Fathers created the Electoral College as a compromise between electing the president via a vote in Congress only or via a popular vote only. The Electoral College comprises 538 electors; each state is allowed one elector for each Representative and Senator (DC is allowed 3 electors as established by the Twenty-Third Amendment).
Prior to the 2016 election, there were four times in US history when a candidate won the presidency despite losing the popular vote: 1824 (John Quincy Adams over Andrew Jackson), 1876 (Rutherford B. Hayes over Samuel Tilden), 1888 (Benjamin Harrison over Grover Cleveland), and 2000 (George W. Bush over Al Gore).
There were very good reasons why the electoral college was used to pick the President. I think the most important one ensuring representation from all parts of the country and not the densely populated ones. The Founding Fathers did not want the majority to rule while drowning out the voices of the minority.
In order for any candidate to win the Presidency, they must win electoral votes from rural areas which would be totally ignored if they were picked by popular vote. There would be no need for these people like farmers to be heard for the Presidency would be only decided in high populated city areas. That is not democratic and the Founding Fathers wanted every person's vote to count, not just the majority.
Hamilton stated that the Electoral College was not perfect but the perfect system for fairness in electing a President. The fact that it's very rare for the President to not win both the electoral college and the popular vote proves it's working. Only five times have they not been in agreement.
The Founding Fathers created the Electoral College as a compromise between electing the president via a vote in Congress only or via a popular vote only. The Electoral College comprises 538 electors; each state is allowed one elector for each Representative and Senator (DC is allowed 3 electors as established by the Twenty-Third Amendment).
I don't think it's necessary. For the last 32 Presidential Elections, the results of the Electoral College vote, and the national Popular vote, yielded the same result in all but ONE--the 2016 Election.
This gave the false impression that the Electoral College is necessary to prevent the more populated States from overwhelming the less populated States in choosing the President. But, given the 1/31 times this has occurred, that's clearly not the case.
The explanation for the one time it did occur in 128 years can be identified as the illegal foreign, mostly Russian, interference with the 2016 Election. So, that was an aberration, not an endemic situation. Steps have been taken to prevent foreign interference from happening again, so we should expect the Electoral and Popular vote results to match up as usual in 2020, based on the long historical record.