Does anyone know if the people selected to cast the votes are required to follow the popular vote or can they choose whomever they like?  -  CT

Good question, CT.  I don't know.
 

The Electoral College is part of the US Constitution and reflects the founding fathers' distrust of EVERYBODY:  centralized government, leading to the tripartate federal systam which was matched with a distrust of the electorate.   

Heck, the original Constitution did not allow for the direct popular election of US Senators---they were selected by the States' legistlatures.

I don't care for it in its present "winner take all" configuration.   The best solution is the on again/off again proposal to allocate the vote as two votes (the state senators quota) as winner take all; the remaining votes would be winner take all by Congressional district.   Would that change the outcome in Pennsylvania a.k.a. "Pennsyltucky" ("Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between")?  Not likely.   But it might make some of the folks in "flyover country" feel a bit less disenfranchised.

I don't care for it in its present "winner take all" configuration. -  Tarnation

I don't either.
 

Just Fred wrote:

Ok, how abot a compromise?  For example, PA has 23 electoral votes.  Let's say The Red Tribe gets 40% of the popular vote and the Blue Tribe gets 60%.  Then 60%, or 13.8 electoral votes go to the Blues and the Reds get 9.2.

It just doesn't seem like it's very democratic or fair representation for one tribe to receive all 23 of PA's electoral votes when 40% of the people voted for the other guy and got nothing for it.

 

That sounds reasonable but I'm sure the devil is in the details. I also don't know how, since we vote for the individual electors, how an elector would give 8/10ths of a vote to one candidate and 2/10ths to another.

I keep going back to the thought that by and large, the electoral college has served us well throughout our history. Certainly, we are at a time where the make up of the nation, combined with that fact that we know so much more about the demographics of the electorate, that presidential campaigns have a fairly simple strategy once they reach the general election.

But 30 years from now, the make up of the electorate will be different. Heck, party platforms may be completely different (Imagine if the libertartian wing of the GOP ends up winning the internal battles within the Republican Party and over time, the right becomes the non-interventionist political party in the U.S.)

I say keep things as they are.

Just Fred wrote:

I guess we will have to disgree on this one, Lager.  I simply don't think the 'winner take all' electoral stuff is a good idea.  Just round off the numbers in the example I presented and award 14 electoral votes to candidate 'A' and 9 to candidate 'B'.

If you really want to get into the weeds of this arguement, I found this paper that was published in 2012 that talks about the pros and cons of apportioning electoral votes via congressional district, the way Nebraska and Maine currently do.

It even highlights a movement in Pennsylvania between 2010-2012 to move to something similar

....What makes this more interesting is that other states might also be a target
for this kind of electoral change. For example, a similar change was recently proposed
for Pennsylvania by various Republican politicians, most notably State
Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi³; despite there being a Republican governor,
and a Republican majority in both houses, the change was ultimately not
approved. Among the reasons cited for its failure was the simple chance that the
state could once again trend Republican in the near future, removing a gained
advantage; another was the simple possibility that the state would lose attention
and clout if fewer of its electoral votes were in play. Finally, there was the possibility
that the change of focus to the Congressional district level for president would
similarly affect other elections down the ticket, putting once-safe state-level seats
into play again.

The bottom line for me is that while the electoral college ain't perfect, it's the best we have and I think has served us pretty well. I think with the proliferation of the media, internet, and the whole information age, we may not see presidential candidates personally visit every district in the U.S. but I also don't think it leads to the level of disenfrachisement that others may claim.