Or 1876, where basically one guy needed 1 electoral college vote to win, the other needed 20, and the commission formed by Congress managed to get the guy with

Or 1876, where basically one guy needed 1 electoral college vote to win, the other needed 20, and the commission formed by Congress managed to get the guy with the 2nd most popular votes the 20 electoral votes needed to win, because of a party line vote in the commission. Not that a party line vote means it's an invalid or unscrupulous election. It's quite expected the team stands together. It'd take something really extraordinary to get a defector. Anyway, the president in 1876 wasn't determined until March 1877. http://elections.harpweek.com/09Ver2Controversy/DayByDay.htm http://elections.harpweek.com/09Ver2Controversy/DayByDay.htm Edit: It's much better to fallback on a parliamentary process like this, where we can only blame ourselves for having voted in X team to be in Congress, thus making the decision should there be a contested election. When it shifts to who can convince judges to do recounts is when it becomes totally nebulous like a flip of the coin, rather than an "oh well that's unsurprising". But no doubt there would be all kinds of outcry about faithless electors should the Electoral College on Dec 19 end up picking someone other than Donald in a way that departs from the expected outcome, even though that's the actual #1 reason why Madison and Hamilton went with the Electoral College system - that voters could get it wrong. Giving less populated states effectively more than 1 vote for 1 person, was a far lesser consideration.