What should replace the Electoral College as practiced today, where it's winner-take-all-by-state in all but two states?

Who'd have thought a month ago Trump would ever get the left to agree that questing close election results was a good idea? Yet here we are today contesting elections in multiple states!

Yet another Trump victory!

The electoral college is obsolete. The transportation/communications difficulties it originally solved are long gone, and the laws forcing electors to vote a certain way have rendered moot the additional check on demagoguery it was intended to be. Now, it's just a way for a minority of obsolete voters to get an outsized say in national politics. Eliminating the electoral college should go without saying. But why assume that we must use a simple plurality of the popular vote?

I propose replacing presidential voting with instant-runoff voting (equivalent to single transferable vote in elections with only one winner, which this is). It's a proven system that's been used in many other countries, quite successfully.

The system is simple. It's easily explainable - everyone ranks their choices, from best to worst, and then if any candidate wins more than half of people's top vote, they win. If not, the candidate who performed the worst is crossed off, and we check to see if anyone has a majority, repeating the process until we have a winner. It's simple enough to be easily usable with paper ballots and manual counting, and requires only a single round of votes to be cast. But it has all the advantages of the more complicated voting systems.

IRV/STV eliminates many of the problems we've seen in American politics:
1) Third parties can be more competitive, because without the spoiler effect, they don't have to convince voters en masse to defect to them, just that they would be better.
2) It separates agreement with the person and agreement with their politics. Clinton and Trump were both widely disliked as people, but they captured huge swaths of the vote simply because people agreed with the vaguest outline of their politics, as denoted by their party affiliation, and had the belief that the only practical way to support those politics was to vote for that candidate despite their personal problems. Had Democrats had a chance to vote for Sanders or Warren, with Clinton as a backup, they would have done substantially better - and perhaps Republicans would have performed better if Kasich or McMullin had been able to be people's primary pick, with Trump as a backup.
3) It encourages moderatism and discourages extremism. Because votes transfer from the weakest candidates to the strongest, and the weakest candidates are usually those at some extreme, it generally transfers votes from candidates at the far left or far right, towards the center. This is a weakness of the system in that it makes the system slow to drastic change, but it is still better than our current system which is nearly as slow to drastic change, and is worse at handling minor changes as it usually overshoots.

Coming from the left, it seems odd that they are decrying a mechanism for electing the US President that is almost identical to the mechanism used to elect the European President (President of the European Union). I say odd, because the left constantly holds the EU and their democratic socialist governments up as the shining examples the US should strive for (as in "in civilized countries like...").

The United States is a collection of more-or-less sovereign states, joined in a common federal government. Somewhat like the EU. The member countries of the EU have distinct national interests but also share common interests with other EU members.

In the federalist government we have in the USA, each State in the Union gets a say in the election of the President. Each State has its own distinct interests but also share common interests with other States. The total number of members of Congress each state has is the basis for the total number of votes for President each state has in the Electoral College. Since each State has two Senators and at least one Representative, each state receives a minimum of three votes, with California--the most populous State receiving the maximum of 55 votes. The number of Representatives is currently capped at 435 (the apportionment of Representatives to States is adjusted every 10 years, based on the census), and the number of Senators is currently 100 (as we have 50 States), and the District of Columbia is also given 3 votes for a total 538 which implies that 270 votes are needed to win the EC.

Under the Constitution, each state is free to determine how they appoint their Electoral College voters and how they are supposed to vote. Currently, every State uses a popular election to select EC voters (and all but two use a winner-take-all method), but there's nothing preventing a State from passing a law allowing the Governor to simply appoint whomever he chooses (i.e., no popular election) or from using a proportional assignment based on election results.

The electors meet and cast their respective votes for President, and assuming there is a majority winner the process is just about complete. Let's ignore the fall-back rules if no majority is obtained as it is outside this discussion.

Virtually the same mechanism as the US Electoral College is used to elect the EU President, except it is the Parliament that elects the EU President and not a separate body specifically for the purpose. But the mechanism is very similar.

In the EU, each member nation in the Union gets a say in the election of the President. Each member nation has its own distinct interests but also share common interests with other member nations. The total number of members of the European Parliament each member nation has is the basis for the total number of votes for President each member nation has. Each of the 28 member nations has at least 6 MEPs, with Germany--the most populous member nation--receiving the maximum of 96 votes. The number of MEPs is currently capped at 750 by treaty. Occasionally, the binding treaties are modified to reapportion the MEPs, this requires unanimous consent and generally reflects changes in membership and population shifts. The EU President is elected by the European Parliament by a majority of its component members (which corresponds to at least 376 out of 750 votes).

MEPs are elected by popular elections in the respective member nations. At the appointed time, MEPs then vote for President, according to their respective party affiliation and national instructions.

How odd that the modern EU, most members of which are democratic socialist states, chose to use this 18th century structure that is so very similar to our own EC mechanisms.

In Finland we have a true multi-party system, not a broken 2-party system. Currently we have 8 different parties in our congress, and 3 parties in our goverment.

One important thing that makes our electoral system work is 2-stage presidential elections - and the american pre-elections are not proper first stage.

How our presidential election system works:

1) Each party selects it's own candidates (could still use similar system than your pre-elections, but it's outside the system)
2) People Vote for first round.
2a) If someone gets >50% of the votes, he/she gets elected immediately.
2b) If nobody gets >50% of the votes, the 2 candidates who got most votes go to second round, people vote for the second round. The one who get more votes wins.

This eliminates the "I most vote for someone because he is the only one who can beat this on I really don't want to be the president" thing on first round, everyone can vote for their true candidate on th first round.

we should eliminate the popular vote for president. The president should be elected by the congress from it's seating members. That way the goverment gets things done and the elections people focus on are the local ones they have more influence over.

Simpler is better => Everybody who wants to understand it, does understand it. Electoral college may have been the simplest viable system in its day, but modern rapid communication enables much simpler alternatives.

Self-evidently-fair => This is hard, because "fair" is subjective -- and there will be factions who claim _any_ system is rigged or biased. Despite the subjectivity, some systems are obviously fairer than others -- extreme example: simple majority voting is fairer than throwing the votes away and appointing a hereditary king. We can certainly come a lot closer to "objectively fair" than the current US presidential system, though. Electoral College system is self-evidently unfair despite its historical honorable intent. If you live in a rural-dominated state your vote counts more than if you live in an urban state. For that matter, if you live in a small (swing) state, your vote counts more than if you live in a large state. And, if you live in a non-swing state, your vote doesn't count at all!

Based on these criteria, my top two choices (in no particular order) would be:
    - Popular vote, winner takes white house. (The clear winner of the "simpler is better" criterion).
    - Popular vote with instant runoff system. (Still fairly simple. I won't bother describing it, it's pretty clear on Wikipedia).

Instant runoff handles "spoiler" candidates better IMO. (I say IMO, since "better" is of course subjective).
Instant runoff may even help discourage the de-facto two-party monopoly that exists fort the US presidency.
For these reasons I have a slight bias towards instant runoff, but still think either of the above variants of popular vote would be vastly better than what we have now.

BTW, does anybody reading this know where I can find the Douglas Hofstadter essay on voting systems? I read it years ago. He demonstrated the pros and cons of many different voting systems, and clearly showed by example that no voting system is perfect. As I recall, for each system he described a scenario that produced outcomes that satisfied none of the voters.