[quote=zk]
Let’s use a different example. Let’s say it’s Sanders/Cruz/Bloomberg. Sanders and Bloomberg get 40% each, and Cruz gets 20%. The red states don’t count for many electoral votes because they don’t have many people. That’s why Cruz only got 20%. But, if nobody gets a majority of the electoral vote, each red state counts as much as each blue state in the house vote, despite the fact that Wyoming has 600,000 people and California has 40,000,000 people. Bloomberg and Sanders split the blue and purple states, and Cruz gets all the red states. Cruz gets “elected.”
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The problem is our election process wasn’t created under a 2 major political party system. They had to take into account a variety of possibilities including multiple strong political parties. Nobody wants a president with only 30% of the popular vote. Especially if the other 70% really really dislike their position. Look at Europe. Most of those countries elect their government leader via collations of the representatives. Most countries in Europe don’t directly elect their president. They elect their political party with the knowledge of whom would be president if that political party has a majority. Some countries have weak presidents elected by a popular majority. All countries feared this rule by weak majority so almost every constitutional republic puts something in place to prevent it.

We decided to essentially give each state an equal vote. We did the same with the senate, it was an important principle that small states still got a say in the government. We could have done it by population in a winner take all fashion but the electoral college already handles this for the most part. We could give the representatives in congress (you did vote for this person to represent you) an equal vote but then again your feared scenario of the 3rd place guy winning the election happens anyways under the current makeup of congress. We could do a run off and maybe this is your preferred solution, but again you can end up with some extreme candidates.

I think out founders thought of a variety of election mechanisms and settled on this one even with it’s flaws. I can’t think of an election mechanism that doesn’t have at least some flaws in certain scenarios.