[big-green-man]

I think that it would be a way to get the US closer to popular vote aligning with the election result, and in a way that allows states to make the change themselves instead of requiring a constitutional amendment or somrthing. You'll never get exactly the same as the popular vote because you're rounding to integers, but it gets reliably close.

More interestingly, this scheme reduces party power inside states, so the incentive is for each individual state not to want to do it even though on the whole it's better, and instead the current status quo is the stable configuration, so getting states to want to do this is basically impossible. Think about it: if every state did this, then one state said "nope, we are winner take all again" that state could decide elections. So this is a system that is easy to implement by states, requires no US constitution amendments or anything like that, but works in such a way that no state would for fear others wouldn't. Interesting game theory here, it's very similar to a tragedy of the commons.

Alternatively, there's a proposed amendment to the US constitution called the equal apportionment amendment, that was passed 200 years ago but never ratified by the states, that changes the way the house of representatives is apportioned, such that among many other improvements, will change the way electors are apportioned in presidential elections. You don't need every state to ratify it because you only need 3/4ths of states to do so, many of which already have, it's binding on all so no worry about any one backing out, and you don't need congress to vote on it because they already did and voted yes centuries ago. It has other benefits too, like reducing the prevalence of 2 parties in the house and therefore elsewhere potentially, and increasing the fair distribution of representation in the house, which suffers from a similar problem as the electoral college.

[flopriore]

I believe you're right, even if all the states agreed to make a similar change, this "equilibrium" state would be unstable. It would require an amendment to the US constitution to make it stable and that would require a huge majority.

Even if they decided to ament the constitution, you would still face another issue: now electoral system is written in the constitution, so it becomes even more difficult to change in the future.

What do you think about the system adopted by Maine and Nebraska instead?

[flopriore]

>It has other benefits too, like reducing the prevalence of 2 parties in the house

Could you elaborate further?

[big-green-man]

Yeah sure.

So just for reference, here's a Wikipedia article about this amendment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_...

You wind up with one representative for every 50,000 people, minimum. Currently, the number of representatives is decided by congress, and the districts are drawn up by them as well. So you've got districts with overrepresented constituents, just like states with the electoral college. It is capped at 435 currently. The parties of course collude to keep it this way, they agree to trade power when redistricting and stuff like that.

With one representative per 50,000 minimum, you wind up with a house that would be, today, about 7000 members. And most of what they do can be passed by a simple majority. House representatives have to campaign directly to their constituents, having that few per means they have to get closer to what they want, which means that, as far as direct legislative representation goes, the pressure to run on overarching political football platforms wanes and the pressure to run on niche and local concerns dominates. With simple majority in the house for most things, that means you have to deliver on a lot more of those local concerns to get anything passed, because half of 7000 people is going to be hard to whip up for a vote on anything.

So you may get some aligned groups caucusing together, you may get them nominally under the same umbrella, you'll get coalitions, all just like happens in Europe, but people will get more granular, close to home representation.