I have been following voting rights stories for a long time, and have been writing about preference voting and Dieboldesque problems for a couple of years now. There's one thing that has never squared with me though, and that's this. Why do so many democrats advocate the popular vote in place of the Electoral College?
From the beginning, our country was founded as a republic that compromises between the popular vote and state sovereignty. This is exactly why Congress is built the way it is - we have the House to reflect the population (gerrymandering aside), and we have the Senate to reflect the equal weight of each of the states.
The Electoral College is a good reflection of this. You take the number of representatives a state has (reflecting the population), and the number of senators a state has (reflecting the states rights), and you get the the number of Electoral Votes each state has.
I'm not saying the Electoral College is a good solution - I can think of plenty that are better. But the one solution that is worse than that is the straight popular vote, because it completely wipes regional interests off the table. Due to states sovereignty, and due to the fact that some states don't have as much population as others, doesn't it make sense that some states would have more of a relative impact than others? Isn't that consistent with each of the fifty states having equal representation in the Senate?
To a point, an argument in support of the popular vote is also an argument against the sort of power-sharing our Congress is built on - would you rather have just a house of representatives (assuming a fair non-gerrymandered representation) and disband the Senate?