You haven't explained why
I am not pretending.
Removing the electoral college gives every person in every state an equal influence. Why would that deepen division? Are you saying there will be people who be unhappy if they don't have more of a say?
Just under half the voters in a state and just under half the electoral votes will have no influence in the choosing of the president as you can't have half a president. The way the numbers work out doesn't even meet the objective, because in the example you gave it was the more populated state that had more influence. The less populated state had much less influence than it would with the popular vote.
The individual states influence is in the senate and congress.
Why can't you have state senators and congressmen elected as they are now and have the federal president elected by a popular vote of everyone in the country? Why should you immediately secede the union? Surely they can just ratify new rules.
To be honest, I don't even know where to start with this comment because it exposes a complete lack of understanding how the U.S. government structures work. Should I start with explaining what representative democracy is? Should I explain how every vote in every state counts exactly the same, just not in the way you think it does? Or how the U.S. is divided into individual states and is not a uniform construct, nor was it ever intended to be besides very specific purposes? I really don't know, this is all covered in the constitution - you don't even need to read the whole thing, you can just read Article 2, that's enough to grasp the concept.
Contrary to what people with no understanding of how the federal republic works, the "popular vote" is a completely useless metric that we only started paying attention to in fairly recent history. The way the U.S. was set up, a Texan is first and foremost a Texan, and an American second. People vote for their representatives within their state, the vote for the President is entirely advisory - the President is selected by the state legislatures by the proxy of electors. This is by design - the ruling body over a citizen is the local state government, not the federal government. The fed was designed to fulfil an oversight function over the states, so in a way, your state representatives represent *you* and the states are represented by the federal government. Every vote has the value of 1 in the state it was cast in - the legislatures then interpret the result of the vote via a prism of their election procedures and send electors accordingly to represent the interests of their constituents.
The U.S. is a fairly unique construct in this sense, the closest analogues would be the European Union, where each member state has their own governments and local elections. They also select their representatives in the Europarliment, but the *President of the European Parliament* is not chosen by popular vote in member states, they're selected by the members of the Parliament. Similarly, in the United Kingdom each individual state, Wales, England, Ireland and Scotland, have their own local assemblies, however the Prime Minister is not selected by popular vote, nor is there any reason for them to be elected in that manner.
The people elect those who legislate in the U.S. - they do not elect the chief executive. The role of chief executive is to execute the legislation that the state representatives have passed. There's a good reason why it's set up in this way - people are meant to elect representatives that will forward the interests of the state as a whole. States then convene and elect a President that oversees the operation of the federal government. Some states have higher stakes than others, and as such they hold different sway, but the system is set in place to calculate exactly how much - it's not set in stone and can change fluidly over time.
I hope that resolves the confusion a bit, because I'm not going to draw a graph. I understand that people are increasingly forgetting about state rights in favour of identifying with an "American Hodgepodge", but in this case the President works on behalf of states as collectives, not on behalf of *you*, that's not their job, and never has been.
What I mean by division is the fact that costal states, that are very few, but large in terms of population, would end up nullifying the voting power of all the states in-between should the popular vote replace the Electoral College. You would end up in a situation where a handful of states can select a candidate they want while the rest have no say at all in the matter. Since the President is selected on behalf of states, that setup makes very little sense.
Take it or leave it, but read the actual constitution before querying me about the basics - if you're not really familiar with the system, no amount of "explaining" will help. If you don't know how the system works, it's pointless trying to explain why it is the way it is. Once again, the United States are not a uniform state in and out of itself, it's a union of federated states. It's a prime example of representative democracy, not a direct democracy. "Why not make it more direct" is an argument with no defined boundaries to it. Why elect anyone at all, why can't we all just vote on policy 24/7 with no government at all, thus directly representing the interests of the smallest autonomous unit - an individual? We have the Internet, after all - it's not like it can't be done. Congress as a whole is a "relict of the past", politicians are obsolete, we can run polls on anything and everything 24/7, right? I'm sure that'll be more efficient.
