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Notes -
I like the EC but prefer the Maine approach (ie overall winner gets the two votes; rest is district by district)
Why would you want gerrymandering to have more influence?
Why do you want machine politics to have more influence?
Yes, gerrymandering impacts races. But so do machine politics (and fraud). By making elections district level you limit the impact of machine politics and fraud. In addition, you change the nature of the presidential elections. Texas is now ripe for democrats to campaign in. Ditto California.
But this does it in a way that doesn’t create real incentive to cheat and still maintains some geographic overbalance for small states.
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If nothing else, the electoral college shields the country from various shenanigans that would happen if you opted for "sum vote totals from fifty different systems": Every state is incentivized to muck with its vote totals, especially with plausible deniability, and it's unclear what enforcement mechanisms the states would have to keep each other honest. IMO voter ID rules and election hardware security become even more contentious when every vote cast nationwide effects the outcome, and, say, Alabama "accidentally" certifying totals with three extra zeros at the end probably doesn't violate their laws. At least right now, the EC bounds state voting issues to only their own electoral votes.
Everyone adopting the Maine system is tolerably close, and doesn't have this problem. I think it's a reasonable choice.
The problem (which the Maine plan addresses quite well) is also that it heavily favors large states. California has 54 electoral votes, equal to 6 Alabamas. What this means is that winning California is hugely important, where a state with only 3 votes for all practical purposes doesn’t matter. And thus the concerns of states with huge EC counts have an outsized effect on federal policies— especially those that affect other states more. I think that’s why our regulations on land use end up wonky. They’re designed to work in urban areas where a wetland isn’t on simeone’s working farm, but on land that nobody wants or uses. If the president had to appeal to rural Alabama the way it has to appeal to LA, those kinds of things would be less likely.
You're conflating federal policy with House of Representatives party politics.
In American federal political terms, both California and Alabama are equally irrelevant, not important, because neither are particularly competitive in presidential campaigns. Presidents don't disproportionately consider the views of states that will go for them regardless, but rather for the states they need to woo to win.
Similarly, the Senate is infamously a body which gives disproportionate favor to smaller states. Flat voting weight regardless of population lets small states like Alabama extort larger states if the larger states want agreement- or at least a non-fillibuster- of their interests. The Senate is where most of the extortion-pork in budgets comes from, because it's the Senators who must be appeased.
In the House, disproportionate weight doesn't come from the voting strength (which is proportional), but rather the number of committe seats. Large states- particularly large mono-party states- can leverage their strength as a voting block to vote their members into key positions that mutually reinforce. What makes California so central in the House is the point that the California Democrats have so many of the votes not just in the Congress, but within the party.
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The Maine system is arguably even better to this end since it even further decentralizes things. No matter how sketchy the results are in Milwaukee or Atlanta or Detroit, there's a cap on how much damage you can do.
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