Today there is no technical reason why votes couldn't be "pooled up" to whatever an election is about (e.g. for presidential election pool up on a whole US level, this would give every US citizen the same voting power no matter where they live and remove anti-democtratic problems like the electoral collage, uneven value of the vote etc.
(1) those who don't think about it much if at all, which is probably the majority of people
(2) those who understand it but benefit from it so want to keep it
(3) those who understand it and want to change it but don't have the influence to get it changed
The supreme court ruled that it is 100% kosher for states to gerrymander for the purpose of consolidating power and excluding other parties. It is not legal to gerrymander to disenfranchise minority groups, but frequently they amount to the same thing.
The only way to change it would be for some novel legal argument to come before the supreme court that convinces them that their previous decision was wrong (very unlikely), or for Congress to pass a constitutional amendment. The latter is not going to happen because the current system is designed in part to make those seats "safe".
It's an incredibly simple, intuitive change that has the potential to increase overall happiness with the results and disincentivize extremism.
Yet it has been an uphill battle to get ranked-choice voting adopted, and some states and municipalities have even had to revert back to first-past-the-post voting after an outcry from voters.
If voters can't wrap their heads around that, I hardly think they would be able to follow along with the mathematical principles outlined in the Quanta article.
You know what? None of this matters. Nothing I'll ever do, say, think, will ever convince a politician of anything. I have 0, zilch, none whatsoever influence on politics, regional, state, national, supranational.
Public politics is for show only. The real deals are done behind closed doors. I don't need these people, and they don't need me (except my money, of course).