Some say going to a pure popular vote would result in lots of court challenges around the country. Another is the claim that the larger population centers would control the election.
Splitting the electoral college by the popular vote is an option. But then you have the problem of nobody reaching the 270 magic number. Because nobody gets enough votes. Although that is also possible with a winner take all apprach since the numbers can add up to 269 and 269 if the states fall right.
The problem with not getting to 270 is why in my opinion with the electoral college it shouldn't be a straight proportion of the popular vote. But I think the winner take all does exactly the opposite of what it was intended since it throws the entire population of the state on one candidate since its based on representatives + senators and the house of representatives is based on population. (As mentioned before Madison and Hamilton the designers of the ec argued against the winner take all approach as not what the system was designed for and tried to get an amendment passed to block it but failed) I think the ec should be divided and there should be a threshold of like all candidates that get 20% or more of the popular vote has the electoral college split by the percentage of the that vote.
Like if the breakdown was
Candidate A gets 48%
Candidate B gets 35%
Candidate C gets 10%
Candidate D gets 7%
And to make it easy... lets say the percentages there is also the popular vote so there was a total of 100 votes. The EC on the line would be 20. Most likely the number is subconsciously based on the fact my state has 20 ec.
So Candidate A and B would divide the 20 ec by their percentage of the vote for candidates that got above 20% or 83 votes
A got 57% of the vote for the candidates that meet the threshold so they would get 12 of the 20 ec votes. 11.56 to be more precise
B would get the other 8.
Now if the election ended up with three candidates meeting the threshold with
A at 40%
B at 27%
C at 23%
D at 10%
With that there's 90 total votes among the threshold candidates. So the ec breakdown would be:
A gets 9 (8.88 to be more exact)
B gets 6
C gets 5
But anyway that's the way I think the ec should work.
Based on my system the electoral college this last election would have been:
Clinton 270
Trump 267
McMullin 1
If you decided to use fractions for the ec it would have been:
Clinton 270.8
Trump 266.9
McMullin 1.3
