Can you win the popular vote and lose the election?

When presidents are elected, we consider it to be the will of the people.

But sometimes that's not the case. Sometimes the person elected does not receive the most votes but still wins the electoral college.

Here's a look at times when popular and electoral voices didn't align.

What is the Electoral College?

In the United States, the winner of the presidential election is determined by the Electoral College.

According to the National Archives, the Electoral College was a compromise between Congress electing a president and a popular vote.

The Electoral College has 538 electors – to become president, a majority of 270 electoral votes is required. Each state has a set of electors. The number is determined by taking the number of senators in a state (2) and adding one for each member of the House of Representatives.

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To put it simply, the candidate who wins the state, excluding Nebraska and Maine, wins all of the electoral votes for the state. In Maine and Nebraska, they award two electoral votes to the popular vote winner in the state and then one electoral vote to the popular vote winner in each congressional district.

Fifty-eight presidential elections have been held in the United States, and the results largely conformed to the popular vote. Here's a look at the five elections in which the popular vote winner didn't win the White House.

Presidential election of 1824

There were four candidates on the presidential ballot – Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, William Crawford and Henry Clay – and all were from the Democratic-Republican Party. Andrew Jackson won the popular vote, but he did not receive a majority of the Electoral College votes. While Jackson had a majority of electoral votes, he was 32 electoral votes short.

The vote went to the House of Representatives. The three leading candidates were promoted to the House of Representatives, eliminating Clay, who was also Speaker of the House. According to History.com, Clay allegedly used his influence as a speaker to get Adams elected. Clay then became Adams' Secretary of State. The results angered Jackson, who accused his opponents of stealing the election.

Presidential election of 1876

Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden won the popular vote over Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, but Congress had to resolve a near-constitutional crisis.

Tilden won 184 electoral votes while Hayes secured 165, but Tilden was still one vote short of the majority. However, according to History.com, 20 electoral votes were disputed.

Republicans rejected the results from Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina. Both candidates won in the states. Since the Constitution did not provide a solution to this situation, Congress established a bipartisan Federal Election Commission composed of House representatives, senators, and Supreme Court justices.

The commission gave the votes to Hayes, who won 185-184. According to History.com, historians believe that Democrats, whose stronghold was the South, were willing to accept Hayes as president in exchange for ending Reconstruction.

Presidential election of 1888

In a pretty nasty contest between Democratic incumbent Grover Cleveland and Republican Benjamin Harrison, the 1888 race featured allegations of selling votes to the highest bidder and suppressing black votes in the South. Cleveland won the popular vote by more than 90,000 votes, defeating the Southern states. Harrison won the Northern and Western states, earning a 233-168 Electoral College victory.

2000 presidential election

Democratic nominee and Vice President Al Gore won the popular vote over Republican nominee George Bush by more than 500,000 votes, but Gore was stuck with 266 electoral votes with only one state in play: Florida. After a recount, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris certified Bush as the winner by 537 votes. The Gore campaign sued, claiming that not all votes were counted because of problems such as “pregnant chads” or “dimpled chads” (punch votes where the punch didn't go all the way through) and “hanging chads” (votes , which were not read because the votes did not go through) Punch the left part of the card dangling.

The Florida Supreme Court sided with Gore, but Bush took the case to the Supreme Court, which ruled in Bush's favor. Bush won the election with 271 votes to 266.

2016 presidential election

Democratic candidate and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.8 million votes, ahead of prominent real estate mogul Donald Trump. Clinton did well in big cities and populous states like New York and California, but the Democrats' “blue wall” of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin collapsed on election night.

Trump prevailed in the battleground states and secured a victory in the Electoral College with 304 votes to 227.