| States have gotten weaker relative to the federal government, so most people identify as being a US citizen rather than a citizen of their state. Keep in mind that Germany is smaller than California, a single US state; and Germans will send representatives rather than vote directly in the EU. If you view yourself as a citizen of your state, then you want to avoid the problem of largely-populated states overruling everyone else. The Constitution split the House and Senate to avoid New York setting law for the whole country. There are some bigger problems: States have a winner-take-all system to magnify their impact in the election. This encourages politicians to spend all their time on a few key battleground states. I wouldn't mind seeing a Constitutional amendment that says, "The people voting for a member of the House also vote for a member of the electoral college, who is assigned to the same district". Then you'd see a few Republicans win in California, and a few Democrats win in Texas. And it'd be easier for 3rd-party candidates to get some visibility. There would still be a statewide vote for the electoral college members tied to the Senate. There was also an amendment proposed along with the Bill of Rights related to the number of representatives. It was never passed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Am... Anti-Federalists, who opposed the Constitution's ratification, noted that there was nothing in the document to guarantee that the number of seats in the House would continue to represent small constituencies as the general population of the states grew. They feared that over time, if the size remained relatively small and the districts became more expansive, that only well-known individuals with reputations spanning wide geographic areas could secure election. It was also feared that those in Congress would, as a result, have an insufficient sense of sympathy with and connectedness to ordinary people in their district. |
That sounds like a tragedy-of-the-commons type of situation.
Anyway, so it seems that your vote means more depending on which state you happen to live in. Suppose we wish to preserve that property, why not simply weigh all votes in each state by the number of representatives that that state would have today, add everything together, and on those numbers decide which candidate becomes president?
Edit: For example, we have states A and B. State A has 3 representatives and 100 inhabitants, and state B has 2 representatives and 50 inhabitants. We have candidates X and Y. In state A, X receives 60 votes, and Y receives 40 votes. In state B, X receives 20 votes, and Y receives 30 votes. Now we calculate the winner:
X receives (3 * 60) + (2 * 20) = 220 "votes"
Y receives (3 * 40) + (2 * 30) = 200 "votes"
X wins.