Calls grow for US poll reform

Hillary Clinton's stunning loss to the populist Donald Trump has been all the more bitter for her supporters because while she trails in the all-important electoral college she won more popular votes, prompting new calls for reform of the US election system.

The former secretary of state was the victim of a system that awards electoral college votes mostly on a state-by-state basis. So she lost despite winning some 400,000 more popular votes than her adversary, according to preliminary results published by American media.

Under the US system, each state has a number of electors based on its congressional representation -- which in turn depends on its population. So a big state like California has 55 electors, while a small one like New Hampshire has four.

Election to the presidency requires support from at least 270 electors, a simple majority of the 538 at play. The electors, mostly party activists, cast their ballots on Dec 19 -- normally a simple formality.

But the system can twist the popular will.

Because a state like California is so predictably Democratic -- just as a state like Kansas is so predictably Republican -- the fight mostly comes down to a handful of so-called battleground states that can swing either way and decide the outcome.

And Trump managed to win most of those key states -- like Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania -- assuring himself of at least 290 electors to Clinton's 228, easily surpassing the 270 needed.

This raises "the question of how democratic our system is," noted Robert Shapiro, a political science professor at Columbia University in New York.

The "one person, one vote" rule, considered a pillar of democracy, does not square with a system of indirect suffrage, he said.

The system seems "to really fly in the face of this central principle of political equality," Douglas McAdam, a sociology professor at Stanford University in California, said Saturday on CNN.

McAdam said the US system, rooted in the Constitution, originally aimed at electing "really upstanding citizens who themselves would decide who the president was going to be," an idea meant to address fears that poorly educated voters might be swayed by dangerous and alluring demagogues.

"In an electoral college system, every vote certainly doesn't count equally," McAdam said. "The votes that happen to be cast in battleground states, the half a dozen states that decide elections, clearly count much more than votes" in reliably Republican or Democratic states.