Popular Vote?

So Gore has openly suggested reform of the electoral system and going to a popular vote for President.  This makes a lot of sense -- the reasons for the electoral college structure have largely vanished (long communication times associated with geographical separation, etc.) and a popular vote would certainly seem more consistent with principals of rule by the will of the people.

Obviously Gore's remarks are self-serving as well -- however you feel about what happened in Florida in 2000, it is a mathematical fact that Gore won the national popular vote in 2000 by half a million votes.  Clearly, more Americans voted for Gore than Bush.  This fact is not in dispute.

The beauty of  a popular vote is that it no longer matters what state you're in: a vote is a vote is a vote.  One vote per voter. Conservatives make much ado about using voter ID laws and other new restrictions to ensure this (this is the advertised reason of course -- I don't buy that it's the real reason, but we've beaten that dead horse pretty well here)

...but all this is beside the point as it ignores the 'extra votes' already built in to our system: under our current electoral college system, I could more than double my own vote just by moving to another state: a single voter's vote in, say, Alaska carries as much weight as 2.5 votes in Minnesota, and a vote in Wyoming carries as much weight as 3.6 votes in California.  California has 66x as many people, but only 18x as much electoral power.  It takes 3.6 Californians to equal the voting power of one resident in Wyoming.

Why should Sarah Palin's vote carry 2.5 times as much weight as mine?  I really don't think she's 2.5 times smarter than me.  But I could pass her up and more than triple my personal political voting power just by moving to Wyoming.   It's weird.