The electoral college has some issues, particularly when combined with a
two-party system. In a
worse-case scenario, if everyone in the US voted in a race with only two candidates, it's possible for one candidate to win with only 21.6% of the
popular vote, while the other candidate loses with 78.4% of the popular vote.
This could happen if the winning candidate polled exactly one more than half the votes in the following states:
AL, AK, AZ, AR, CO, CT, DE, DC, HI, ID, IN, IA, KS, KY, LA, ME, MD, MN,
MS, MO, MT, NE, NV, NH, NM, NC, ND, OK, OR, RI, SC, SD, TN, UT, VT, VA,
WA, WV, WI, WY
And the other candidate polled all of the votes in:
CA, FL, GA, IL, MA, MI, NJ, NY, OH, PA, TX
Muke (below): Let's do this nice and slowly. If Alaskans get 3x the power with their vote, and Californians get 1.25x the power with their vote, they have to be taking it from somewhere else in the country. In some other state, voters only get .75x the power with their vote. Why? Because it's impossible for everyone to have more than 1x the power with their vote. Your logic becomes flawed when you try to take two examples (Alaska and California) and extend it to the entire country.
Duane Dibbley (below): You say that "a popular vote is not necessarily representative of the entire nation." By counting the entire (voting and nonvoting) populations of counties, you're saying that people who don't vote really would have voted with the majority.
All:
In fact, that's the biggest problem with the Electoral college. It converts everybody in the state, whether voter, non-voter, even those voting in the minority, to those voting in the majority. My existance in one state, whether I voted for or against the majority, counts as a vote for the majority. What if I don't agree with the majority of my state? Too bad, my vote counts along with the majority, just because I added 1 to the population of the state. Obviously, the two extra electoral votes each state gets only adds to the problem.