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Suffice to say that it's a Pandora's Box. Once you open the discussion to reforming one part of the system, everything is suddenly on the table

Thats fine with me. It's a chicken and the egg type of problem and eventually something has to be started to get change to happen. Nothing can change overnight. But you can at least take the first step so that the next morning you are a tad bit closer.

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I can think of one good reason to keep the Electoral College around. It gives you someplace to focus your attention if things go wrong.

I suppose. But consider this. We live in a day and age where we know who is likely to be the next president days after the election. Under the current system, the actual vote won't occur until December. If things ever came that close, we have the technology and manpower to recount things quite a few times before the new president takes over. As long as we don't have punchcard systems in widespread use (and legally they should be all but gone now), recounts are easier then they were say 50 years ago. I'm not even talking about electronic voting being the main way to do recounts, but more the fact we have reliable optical scanners and such for the fill in the bubble ballots still in widespread use.

The other part of the presidental election process reform I believe in is implementing some sort of ranking based voting. More and more cities are implementing some type of system, usually after a near runaway vote to implement it. San Fransisco just used it in this past election for all city officials, and it worked well.