The Electoral College is flawed -- so are the alternatives

Democracy is built on majority rule and the concept that every person's vote counts.

Yet five times in history, American presidents have won office while losing the popular vote, with two of those instances coming in the past 20 years -- George W. Bush in 2000 by a margin of around 500,000 votes and Donald Trump in 2016 by about 3 million.

At issue is the uniquely American system of the Electoral College, which provides that a group of specially chosen representatives (538 at present) for each state choose the president, generally using a winner-takes-all model based on the popular vote.