A thousand times yes. In fact, the whole voting process should really be revisited (though it is somewhat simple, there are a *lot* of problems with it).
No
the reason it allows smaller state to have a voice in the election. In a popular vote scenario an candidate ca just bypass smaller populated state. The Electoral College fits the Federalist ideal of the candidate has to get approve from each state rather than large populations of the whole I would instead limit each state by constitutional adornment to 5 member.
I agree that the electoral college adds bias in favor of less populated states. Whether that is desirable or not is subjective; I personally would prefer to see a more general way to minimize the degree to which any given population (states, party affiliations, ethnicities, etc.) can be disenfranchised that didn't entail an effective bias to votes, but I'm not aware of a particularly good solution to that problem.
Having said that, the fact that states give 100% of their electoral college votes to the candidate with 50%+1 votes in that state imposes a considerably larger bias in favor of states anticipated to have close elections. Strongly Democratic and strongly Republican states, for instance, didn't get very much presidential campaigning this season, whereas "swing" states got the vast majority of presidential campaigning. This is because winning votes to tip the scale in a swing state leads to more electoral college votes, but winning more votes in a state that's already likely to vote strongly in your favor provides no benefit in the election whatsoever.
What I've described above is explained well in
this video (it's made by the same guy as the video I linked in the last political thread, but sadly, this one lacks the previous one's furry theme). The video's author opposes somewhat strongly the notion of giving individuals in smaller states more effective voting power, but his comments about the swing state bias I discussed above hold independently of this. The video also explains where the 22% popular vote Ziel mentioned in his post came from.
Note that if a candidate instead decides to use the same strategy for largest states (in other words, deliberately campaigning against the benefit of the electoral college to small states), he/she can still win the electoral college vote with 28% of the popular vote by playing the electoral college. In other words, the bias in favor of winning 50%+1 in as many states as you can is so strong that it trivializes the benefit that smaller states are given by the electoral college.
If the electoral college, for example, were changed such that electoral college votes of each state were distributed in proportion to that state's popular vote, the bias in favor of small states would remain but the bias in favor of swing states would no longer exist. Under such a system, a discrepancy between electoral college votes and popular vote can still exist, but it is less likely. For instance, a minimum of 44% of the popular vote would be required to secure 50% of the electoral college vote; this could only be done if a candidate won 100% of the least populated states, ignoring the rest. Though I would be more in favor of a more advanced form of the popular vote, I think you may prefer a voting system like this given your desire to safeguard the interests of smaller states.
