Why does anyone concern themselves with the popular vote, when it comes down to the electoral college? The popular vote seems like a pointless metric.
Instead I suggest one should move to abolish the electoral college and instead count votes directly. The candidates should all be on the ballot. Then use Approval Voting where each voter gets to mark all candidates that they like.
There should be a French-style second round in case the top winners are too close together, say inside a 1% or 5% margin—in other words you could never win by a single vote, you'd always need hundreds of thousands of votes.
People will want to have local representation, which means local elections and boundaries for the reach of local government. When it comes to state-wide and national elections, either re-use these existing boundaries or determine districts using a fair algorithm. The way that politicians get to gerrymander their own seats is an ongoing scandal.
With approval voting replacing first-past-the-post, districts in presidential elections would be reduced to a mere organizational function. No redrawing of arbitrary borders should influence the outcome. It will still be important to ensure open and fair procedures; nobody should be forced to drive a car to reach a single distant mail ballot box or voting station only to have then to queue up for hours. This and other measures have been used in the past to defraud voters.
Yeah, no thanks. Two wolves and a lamb deciding on dinner. We are a republic and not a direct democracy intentionally because the founding fathers realized that mob rule is stupid.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%A4sidentschaftswahl_in_F..., translated by Copilot:
The election of the French President is governed by Articles 6 and 7 of the Constitution of the Fifth French Republic. Since a referendum in 1962, the President has been directly elected by eligible voters. If no candidate receives an absolute majority of votes in the first round, a runoff election is held between the two candidates who received the most votes in the initial round.
In every election so far, a runoff has been necessary. The highest vote share in the first round was achieved by Charles de Gaulle in the 1965 presidential election with 44.6%.
The term of office for Presidents was reduced from seven to five years through a referendum in 2000. Since 2002, the French elect the head of state and the members of the National Assembly for five-year terms. Re-election is possible any number of times, but no more than two consecutive terms are allowed.
To run for election, a candidate must be at least 18 years old and eligible to vote. Additionally, they must gather at least 500 signatures from supporters who hold elected political offices. Approximately 42,000 officeholders are eligible, including mayors, National Assembly members, senators, and regional or departmental councilors. These signatures must come from at least 30 different departments or French overseas territories, with no department contributing more than one-tenth of the required signatures (i.e., 50 signatures).
The number of representatives allocated to each district is based on population, but must be a positive integer, and the dinner planing meeting is capped at 8 representatives.
Mountain lions are solitary. The 5 mountain lions live in 5 different districts. The 10 sheep all live in the same herd, which is in a 6th district.
By population then each mountain lion district should get 0.533 representatives, and the sheep district should get 5.333 representatives. But representatives must be a positive integer, so the mountain lions districts have to each get rounded up to 1. And with the meeting capped at 8 that only leaves 3 for the sheep.
I am not arguing that what we have is perfect, it’s not…but direct democracy or god forbid these ranked choice and run off voting schemes don’t improve our ability to get anything but more of the same two shitty political parties and their same two shit candidates that rise to the tops of their respective political cesspools.
If it were up to me, sortition would be how we select a president.
In a smaller homogeneous country you could have a point (including our individual states), but in a country as large, diverse, and powerful as the united states it seems to me that you need that balance of power spread amongst the entities of the country..both the people in the form of their representatives and the states via their representatives (i.e. senate and electoral college) as it relates to election of the executive.
In general, parliaments will always have issues where there is no one representing them. For example privacy, encryptation, drug issues are commonly underrepresented here in Europe. This means for example that altough 1% agrees that privacy laws matter most to them, they may not have representatives. Additionally, the existence of parties in the parliament may lead to suppression of the "represenativeness" of certain representatives.
Then, ALSO, representative democracy encourages politicians to make decisions to maximize vote count, instead of "good" alternatives. Additionally, with direct democracy if you really want to go against someone, you need to either make very clever legislation with a hole that others won't notice or to gain majority support for that. To convince a majority to vote to suppress your enemies can be difficult. If for nothing else, for the fact that small parliaments are likely to have disproportionate numbers of psychopathic and/or incompetent representatives at times.
Voters tend to choose based on partisan loyalties and short-term possibly out-of-control events rather than holding politicians accountable for decision-making. If there are no representatives to hold accountable, this is not as much of problem. Past elections can be reviewed in time, say new decisions by default re-voted biannually, to minimize the short term bias. This is called "Continuous" voting.
Direct democracy has worked well for the Swiss. With modern technology I do not believe that at scale continuous direct democracy where one gets to vote from their phone on elections rolling every 24, 36 or 48 hours would fail.
Balance of power can of course be handled with (1) ministeries (2) presidential elections (3) judges. One could say that ministeries are representative, but the reality is that ministers (1) cannot form coalitions like parliaments (2) have measurable highly clear "performance" which can be tied to salary (3) will be much more likely chosen to represent what voters want because in every election for health minister the voters will be solely divided based on what they want from health minister, whereas representative democracy makes minister and other seats strategic tools.
I would find it interesting if pulling in these days is actually able to figure out anything. In addition to the polling problem itself, we have two frontrunners who have probably garnered more "not that one" votes than any previous race in history.