And the voting populace of the nation as a whole is the best representation of the views of the entire nation that we can currently produce.
This is incorrect, it provides you with a locally skewed representation, something that can be easily avoided.
Artificially breaking the voters up into blocks does not make it more reliable. If you want to weight the votes based on known demographic and geographic spread, fine. The EC does not do that effectively.
I am not claiming that the EC is effective. I'm claiming that it's a world of improvement over your proposal. I already pointed out a few factors that I'd prefer to see refined, so trying to convince me that the system isn't perfect as-is is a bit of a trivial task.
If you were advocating for anything else than the "popular vote", you'd have an easy time steamrolling over the arguments for EC. But you chose to back the worst of all options.
Literally everything you said about the electoral college in this thread has been wrong. It does not take into account anything about active voters or percentage of the population who voted. It only gives more representation to people who live in states that are less populous. None of this other stuff matters at all.
And objectively, it is worse than the popular vote at representing the people as a whole fairly. It does not meet the majority criterion, so a candidate liked by more than 50% of the populace is not guaranteed to win. The popular vote does meet this criteria, a criteria used by voting theorists to measure the fairness in a voting system. In fact, the electoral college meets
none of the criterion used to evaluate a fair voting method. And I don't think I've heard any proponent say that it does, either. Most concede that it represents small states more, and then proceed to defend that. It does not ensure that most Americans support the president, obviously; it does not equalize representation among states, since they are still based on population, and because of the current winner-take-all system, it causes candidates to focus on swing states; it does not ensure diverse support for the president.
I can't see anywhere where it would do better than a first-past-the-post voting system, and this weird argument about representing states with less active voters more is crazy. And this:
That is simply mathematically incorrect. The weights were applied proportionally to the populations, if only indirectly.
is the craziest of all the claims. No, mathematically, it DOES represent voters in small states more by giving every state 2 votes, then distributing votes proportionally. The total votes represent a fewer amount of voters in small states, and therefore mathematically weights voters in small states more. The only thing I
think you are trying to claim is that it gives equal representation to states of equal population regardless of how many of them actually voted, but I do not know why that should be considered a good thing, nor does that address the issue of disproportionate representation among the states.
As it stands, a majority of states can support a candidate and he would not win, and a majority of people can support a candidate and he would not win. I fail to see how that system is in any way a fair voting system, whether you value the U.S. as a collection of states or as a collection of people.