Okay you hit on a much bigger issue- swing states. IMHO the fact that 'swing states' are a thing is a problem that we should fix. Why isn't EVERY state a 'swing state'? Why is the voting outcome of certain states essentially prewritten? THAT is a problem. EVERY state should be in play.

Some of that blame rests with lazy voters who will blindly vote red or blue without consideration of the actual candidates.

A bigger blame though rests much deeper in our electoral system. It's not the electoral college that takes blame, it's first-past-the-post voting (IE simple majority).

FPTP voting heavily rewards coalitions who rally behind a single candidate. So for example if fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, and libertarians all say 'let's elect the Republican' while liberals (for example, hypothetical) split up into the Democrats and the Greens, the Republican will win EVERY time.

This is a problem because it means more often than not you're not voting FOR someone, you're voting AGAINST someone.

Recent DNC nominees have been a perfect example. Look at Kamala- she was polling at 2% before she got nominated, but she still got a huge % of the vote simply because she wasn't Trump. DNC could have put forth a keg of stale beer as their candidate and it'd have gotten 30% of the popular vote because those people were voting AGAINST Trump, not FOR the DNC. And THAT's a problem, because it's forcing people to vote for someone they don't actually support.

The solution is dump FPTP and switch to something like Instant Runoff Voting. In most suggested flavors of IRV, you don't have a primary- you have a large ballot with everyone who gained enough signatures to be on the ballot. Ideally there'd be 8-10 candidates. You then vote for as many or as few as you like in order of priority. Thus you can vote FOR the guy you actually want, without losing your vote AGAINST the guy you don't want.

To count the votes, all the #1 votes are added up and you see if a candiate got 50%. If none did, you find whoever voted for the least popular candidate, tear off all their #1 votes and reallocate their ballots based on the #2 votes. Again you look for 50%. Repeat as many times as necessary until you have a winner.

Great response. This is the sort of intelligent conversation Reddit used to have and I love it.

Why do small tables deserve this special protection from being ignored?

Because the office is made up of both introverts and extroverts, and both make major contributions to the company. Both ways of life should have a voice, ignoring either one in favor of the other harms the whole company.

Quantity wise there's more extroverted boisterous sales reps and middle managers (who sit at large tables) than there are introverted, socially awkward product engineers and IT people (who sit at small tables), but without those engineers and IT the company has no product to sell nor access to email. And without the sales people and their managers, the product is being developed but nobody will buy it. Both groups rely on each other, therefore both groups should have a roughly equal seat at the table.

That analogy holds up pretty well to the real world IMHO- without rural people we have no farms, no crops, no food, and (back before we sent it all to China to increase shareholder value) no manufacturing. Should we tell those who feed our nation that their voice doesn't matter because there's fewer of them spread out over a larger area?

No, I believe both ways of life- rural and urban- both make major contributions to society and to our nation. Ignoring either one in favor of the other harms us all.

And besides, there's the old 'do un to others'-- if the total rural population was greater than the urban population, would you want them imposing rules that make good sense out in the middle of Nebraska on a major city? Of course not. The reverse is also true- policies that make sense in cities often don't work in the countryside.

A perfect example here is guns. In a major city with police on every block and a drug problem, you might not want people walking around openly carrying pistols and rifles. At the same time in a rural area it might be extremely unwise to go for a hike without an readily accessible high caliber weapon, as the woods are full of bears and other predators that might consider a human a tasty snack and consider a few 9mm rounds motivation to eat quickly rather than any sort of real threat. Two different areas, different needs, neither one should get to impose policy on the other IMHO.

The beauty of the Constitution is how it formed as a compromise of interests. Yes, slave states were pushing for extra representation, but so were small states. And the result was a compromise of interests.
Of course we dun fucked it up. The problem isn't the strategy, the problem is how we execute it today: (from your link)

Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 68, published on March 12, 1788, laid out what he believed were the key advantages to the Electoral College. The electors come directly from the people and them alone, for that purpose only, and for that time only. This avoided a party-run legislature or a permanent body that could be influenced by foreign interests before each election. Hamilton explained that the election was to take place among all the states, so no corruption in any state could taint "the great body of the people" in their selection.

I don't think the Framers imagined, or would have wanted, anything like the two-party duopoly we have today. The reality is we have a party-run legislature, a party-run executive, and a permanent body (RNC / DNC) that ARE influenced by all kinds of interests, foreign and domestic.
Because those parties have become corrupt, and it's essentially impossible to get elected without them, the corruption is spread nationwide.

Another way to “get something more like a fair vote” is to count the votes by person and not by table. Actually, this is not just “something more like” a fair vote - it’s the very idea (as in “Plato’s Theory of Ideas”) of a fair vote. This what we compare any drawing of district lines to determine how fair it is.

Going to the pizza analogy- let's say each table puts forward one representative to serve on the Lunch Committee, which decides on the menu and food vendor selection. This involves a lot of minor decisions, like it doesn't make sense to poll the entire company about which vendor should operate the cafeteria; it makes more sense to have a smaller committee that will review contract proposals and stand up for the needs of their table in vendor selection and menu creation.

However, 'tyranny of the majority' is a thing. Majority rule only works when something protects the legitimate interest of the minority. For example let's say the company is in Texas- you've got 98 people who love BBQ, one person who can't eat pork for religious reasons and one vegetarian. If you don't force their needs to be considered, lunch will be pulled pork every day and those two get disenfranchised.

Or do you suggest we just poll all 100 people 'what do you want for lunch' and go with the result of 'pulled pork every day'?