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Er, no, the electoral college makes this problem worse. It serves to magnify the votes of certain districts over others, and it's often well-known which ones are the important ones (e.g. flipping a California district makes zero difference, flipping a Florida district is enough to change W to Gore). With the popular vote, it really requires a massive effort to shift the result by a few percentage points. With the electoral college, you just need to "fortify" the vote in a few well-chosen places.
Mind you, I still don't believe the 2016/2020/2024 elections were invalid (despite America's uniquely insane lack of voter ID). You'd still need a pretty large conspiracy to actually commit fraud at that scale, AND you'd have to overshoot, because you'll be wrong on some of the districts that you think will be "important".
Furthermore, democracy's most important feature is just to make government answerable to the will of the people. That survives even if every person on the [left/right] with 49% support will get frauded up to 51%. They're still reliant on that 49%; it doesn't make them an omnipotent dictator.
Note that this is by the choice of the states. Two states divide their EC votes in ways I think are probably better, but the game theory is that for each state, first-past-the-post maximizes the utility of marginal local votes, presumably maximizing the attention (up to and including "pork") that politicians give to them, especially in swing states. I think unilateral disarmament there probably requires Congress to force them all to do it together.
OP's point was that the EC distributed vote count is robust against single points of data corruption: each can only swing state outcomes, not national. Related: I think the Interstate Popular Vote Compact would only last until some state (maybe not even a party) threatens to certify ten billion votes, and challenge the standing of other states to question its counting ability.
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Hmm we might both be right here.
What I meant by making it harder is that if you have a candidate that is crap and gonna lose 40 states, you need to commit probably 20 different instances of election stealing to have a safe outcome.
If the candidate is going to lose the popular vote by two million you just need to commit enough fraud in LA and New York to swing the election.
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