I think we all agree here that the whole EC system is BS and can lead to terrible results, but I was responding to the notion that winning the election with only 11 or 12 states (representing 60% of the population) was especially unfair or scary, when that’s among the more fair scenarios.
And, regardless of how many states are won, the mathematical possibilities are so, so much worse than someone winning with only 30.6% of the popular vote.
For one thing, you don’t need to get 51% of a vote in a state to win it. You only need a plurality. That’s why, for one example, Clinton won states like Nevada, Montana, Maine and New Hampshire in 1992 with less than 40% of their votes. And if there are enough strong 3rd party candidates running there’s almost no lower limit to how many votes constitute a plurality. (Basically I guess the lowest possible limit would be 2 votes for one candidate and 1 vote each for a bunch of others?)
So in my post above I said that a candidate could win with much less than 25% of the vote, but that’s not really even close to the worst possible result. In the most extreme scenario where the candidate won a plurality in the 38 least-populus states with 2 votes each, and the other candidate won 100% of the votes in the most populous states, the popular vote outcome could be something like 76 votes to 155 million, with the 76 votes winning.
