The proposal in Pennsylvania is to allocate electoral votes by congressional district, not all to the winner of the nationwide popular vote.
No, just the opposite. It limits the impact of the vote fraud we have in large urban areas. What they are doing is awarding 2 EV to who ever gets a majority in the state and the rest are awarded on the basis of the congressional districts won. In the popular vote approach the impact of a couple million fraudulent votes from the large urban areas will sway close elections.
You are defeating your own argument and you don't even know it. The truly small states, with only 1 Congressional District, will still have 3 EC votes, and will award those votes in exactly the same way, winner takes all. While every other state, with 2 Congressional Districts and up, will all lose a bit of whole-state power, as their EC votes can now be split.
So lets take California, or New York, or Texas, as examples of large high population states. As winner takes all, they are very important. They are also fairly solid in one direction or another. But those three states wield an enormous EC advantage. Split the vote by Congressional District, and the EC weight of the 3 EC states remains the same, while the EC weight of the large states is reduced. So small states will not become irrelevant. On the contrary, they will gain EC power!
Right now, Presidential campaigns are waged largely in the swing states. Under the new plan, they would be waged in the much larger number of swing districts, covering far more States.
This better localizes the vote too. A red voter in San Diego who feels his vote is a waste because CA always goes blue, can now see his districts vote go red! Of course, that also works the other way around for blue voters in Texas.
The devil in me would like to see this system installed in as many blue states as is possible given the election of 2010, while maintaining winner takes all in the solid red states!
It is true that the Electoral College was a compromise that was designed to give the smaller states more of a say in the election of the President than their population would justify. But the practical effect of that has changed over the years. In the election of 1800, the electoral votes of the smallest states (RI, OH) were each about 1/7th of the electoral votes of the largest state (VA). Now, the electoral votes of the smallest states (WY, AK, etc) are 1/20th of the electoral votes of the largest state.
As the size of Congress has grown, the additional influence given to smaller states by the two electoral votes for senators has diminished. If the sole purpose of the electoral college was to balance the influence of large states and small states, then the formula would need to be adjusted - perhaps by allocating 3 electors per senator rather than 1. That would increase the representation of the smallest states by 133%, but it would only increase the representation of the largest state by 7%.
If every state did this it would render the smaller states irrelevant.
But my making the districts the deciders it actually counters the infleonce of the high population state.
The real dangerous idea is National Popular Vote, which would give the election to the Three Towers of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles - a government which looks not like America
