Re: You supported a system...
The electoral college system (as far as vote allocation... not talking about the actual presence of people known as electors here) is a reflection of how the primary unit of government in the US is the state, not the federal. The national popular vote is a nothing number because there is no national election; there are 50 state elections. The national popular vote is as meaningless as the total number of (goals, points, runs, whatever) scored across a series of games in your favorite sport. It doesn't matter who scored the most across all of the games; what matters is who won the most games. The game is the basic unit of sports, not the series, so the series total is just a statistic without any real meaning.
If each state had the same population, it would be easy to tally the various state elections-- simply have the winner of each state get their total of state votes incremented by 1. The states do not have equal populations, though, so the system we have weights it heavily by population, but not completely, in order to keep the urban areas in big states from being the only areas that anyone cares about.
It's not an outdated system. It's the only one that makes any sense in a federal system. The US is a federation of states, and we don't have a national government. We have a federal government (more akin to the EU than the government of any of the countries within the EU).
I don't think the US is repairable. Trump is a symptom, not the cause. I wish we could dissolve it and start again-- only I don't think it would just be one country the second time around.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
