I would have won popular vote 'even bigger and more easily', says Trump

Donald Trump has said he still would have won the US presidential election if it were based on the popular vote rather than the Electoral College system. The Republican insisted that he would have campaigned differently, allowing him to clinch the White House by an even bigger margin.

The US President-elect's comments come as his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, looks set to edge Trump out by around a million votes. One state is left to be counted.

In the US, 270 Electoral College votes are required to win the presidency, not a majority of all votes. If elections in the US were based on the popular vote, Trump may not have necessarily lost as the campaign would likely have been broader than the 10 to 12 key battleground states that were frequently visited.

Writing on Twitter, Trump said: "If the election were based on total popular vote I would have campaigned in N.Y., Florida and California and won even bigger and more easily.

"The Electoral College is actually genius in that it brings all states, including the smaller ones, into play. Campaigning is much different!" he added.

However, the President-elect has previously branded the Electoral College "a disaster for democracy" following Mitt Romney's 2012 loss to Barack Obama. Trump added that "the phoney Electoral College made a laughing stock out of our nation".

Speaking in an interview on the 60 Minutes programme on Sunday (13 November), Trump reiterated his preference for the popular vote system. "I'm not going to change my mind just because I won. But I would rather see it where you went with simple votes," he said.

"You know, you get 100 million votes and somebody else gets 90 million votes and you win. There's a reason for doing this because it brings all the states into play – Electoral College, and there's something very good about that. But this is a different system. But I respect it. I do respect the system," Trump told interviewer Lesley Stahl.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who challenged Clinton for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, has also said it was time to "rethink" the Electoral College system.