To each their own, but I voted here in Illinois, as well, and remain of the opinion that my vote was discarded -- as a result of the judicial coup spearheaded by Scalia.
As for the Electoral College, I don't have a real problem with the per-state compartmentalization that it provides. Would you want to have to perform a manual recount across the entire nation just because some lazy, worthless election supervisor in Palm Beach, Florida didn't do her job?
My primary complaint with the Electoral College is with the Senatorial bonus associated with each state.
The Electoral Votes for each state are apportioned based on the number of US House representatives, providing an almost democratic approximation of that state's percentage of the US population; however, each state also receives 2 bonus electoral votes -- 1 for each Senator. So, sparsely populated states become disproportionately represented in Presidential vote totals.
Putting all the other Election 2000 issues aside (butterfly ballot, Duval multi-page ballot, pseudo-felon purging, judicial coup, NEUMANN!, etc), Gore would have won the election by about 13 electoral votes were the Senatorial bonus removed from the *tainted* totals (and by 37 had Florida EVs reflected voter intent).
After the Senatorial bonus, my next complaint is with the winner-take-all allotment of each state's electoral votes. It's hardly reasonable for all the electoral votes in a state to go to a candidate that wins by only 1 vote, given that the election is nationwide. This is a much larger component of disenfranchisement of voters than the Senatorial bonus, but is murked-up by the issue of our being a union of states.
One interesting item...
Wonder whatever happened to this initiative, and whether any other state is considering similar moves. (I doubt it, since doing so would weaken a state's electoral power should it implement such a change unilaterally.)
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p.s. For reference....
Gore popular vote lead was approximate 537,000.