With the electoral college, we don't hold a popular vote.
This provides compartmentalization of corruption --- if election officials in some state cause an extra 10,000 votes to be counted for their preferred candidate, it may affect their state's selection of electors, but can't influence the results of other states. In a close election by popular vote, 10,000 votes could be very significant.
Additionally, the electoral college provides compartmentalization of natural disasters. If there's a blizzard in some state (or several), their voting turnout will likely be much lower, and there is no provision for makeup elections; however, we can assume that voters of different parties will have reasonably equal difficulty getting to the polls, so within the local area, the resulting ratios should be similar to results of a non-disrupted election. However, the disrupted states would cast many fewer votes, so other states would have more influence; if the state was highly in favor of one candidate, it could be a big swing.
The alternative is only counting the popular vote, which only serves to disenfranchise the majority of states.
Without the electoral college, a candidate would only have to campaign in and win three or four large states, and the rest of the nations and its concerns can be ignored.
That concern is the whole reason we have the House/Senate system: So that large states with lots of people in the House of Representatives don't run amok. The Senate balances that out.
But this system already exists via swing states. Voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida determine the election currently, just look at how much is spent on advertising in those states compared to non-swing states. Look at how often candidates visit Ohio vs Kentucky.
The idea that the electoral college equally franchises all Americans is purely a myth.
The majority of red states are also the majority of the population, so this doesn't check out. (Trump states ~180mm to Hillary's ~140mm.)
https://www.cnn.com/election/2016/results
>Trump 46.4% votes 62,984,825
>Clinton 48.5% votes 65,853,5165
That's not exactly true though, because of the electoral college Republicans in California don't bother to vote, since their vote doesn't count.
If you didn't have an electoral college then the popular vote count would have been different.
You can't change the rules of the game after the fact and say "look we would have won", without also considering that people would have played differently with different rules.
Regardless, it's a moot point, because according to the Constitution as written, those electors are supposed to only be accountable to themselves. The idea being the community electing the most level-headed and educated amongst them to make the decision everyone else would be okay with.
Most states don't respect that intent since the formation of the Party system, so really what we have now is little more than an abomination completely unintended by the Founders.
Despite what the ballot may say, voters in the various states are voting for electors, not for president, and the votes can't be added together into a meaningful number.
You could certainly take the numbers, along with registered party affiliation and other demographic data, and historic data from more contested elections in the various precincts, and guess what the vote counts might be at various levels of turnout (including scenarios where more eligible but currently unregistered persons turn out to vote), and those guesses would likely make for a much more interesting discussion than just pointing out a number that seems like a statistical oddity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_House_of_Re...
Would incentivize just campaigning to get as many people to vote as possible in the highest density population centers, meanwhile most people don't even pay attention to politics and have no interest in it.
These people really should not be voting in the first place and a system which encourages vote harvesting even more than it already is encouraged is not a step in the right direction.
Are you arguing that it’s bad when all Americans are encouraged to vote? That sounds like a functional democracy to me.
I agree with many of the Founders that the people often get in their own way, not thinking rationally and focusing only on the short term.
The will and petty desire of the mob needs to be balanced against what is really good for the nation in the long run.
In no universe does the electoral college mitigate corruption on the federal level. In fact, one could argue that it makes corruption worse, because a candidate only has to win a few key states to tip the election, regardless of the popular vote.