[saghm]

> If my village forms a union with your village and both our villages have 1000 inhabitants at the time I don't want your village to be able to dictate our common policy just because you have more children or more people died in my village 20 years from now. Thus when we are forming a union we stipulate that we have equal voting rights.

That's not how the electoral college works. The electoral college equivalent would be one village with 1000 people, the second with 2000, and the third with 4000, and each village getting "electoral votes" proportional to their population that gets awarded entirely to the candidate with the majority vote in that village. The entirety of the first two villages vote for candidate A, which awards 1 electoral vote for the first village and 2 electoral votes for the second. In the third village, which has 4 electoral votes, candidate A only gets 1999 votes, whereas candidate B gets 2001 votes, so they win the electoral vote 4-3 and become the leader despite only winning 2001 votes overall out of 7000.

The reason that the analogy needs to be this complicated is because the electoral college isn't some sort of common-sense system that happens to occasionally produce quirky results; it's an extremely contrived system that produces equally contrived results, which shouldn't be remotely surprising.

[bluecalm]

I simplified it a bit however this:

>>that gets awarded entirely to the candidate with the majority vote in that village

is not correct. It's up to the states to decide how they split their electoral votes.

It seems natural to me. States gets electoral votes based on census and then they decide how to split them.

[saghm]

> If my village forms a union with your village and both our villages have 1000 inhabitants at the time I don't want your village to be able to dictate our common policy just because you have more children or more people died in my village 20 years from now.

> States gets electoral votes based on census and then they decide how to split them.

How is this any different than the original problem you cited before? The majority of a state deciding to allot the entirety of its votes to a single candidate based on a majority of the internal vote is pretty much exactly what you described. That makes sense for a state-wide office like a senator or governor, but there's absolutely no reason that it should work like that for a national election. The only possible argument I could imagine is that it's an attempt to make sure that people in each state have their priorities represented, but it does the _opposite_ of that by rendering what's usually over 40% of the votes in each state entirely meaningless, and that's not even mentioning the fact that states aren't monolithic entities with uniform concerns but populations of individuals who might care about different things.

There's no point in mincing words here; the electoral collage is a construct designed to give states the power at the expense of the individuals in the state. I'm sure there are people who would argue that's a good thing, but I'd argue it's an anachronism from a time when most people had far less access to education and far fewer concerns that ranged beyond their local area. Granted, at the time I'm writing this it's not clear which way the popular vote went in 2024, but that doesn't change the fact that in the presidential elections preceding this one, the "winner" lost the popular vote a third of the time across two decades, so this isn't a theoretical concern.