What if electoral votes were awarded proportionally?

[muon2]

It's time for the popular vote to determine the President.  Period.

I still contend that it should require a runoff if there is no majority, as France does for its president. A plurality president would not be advisable when the executive has such strong powers. We often overlook that since the two party system is so ingrained. But there's nothing that prevents the US from having more than two strong parties (perhaps except the EC).

Parliamentary democracies don't have to worry about that since a government needs over 50% of the members to form. If there is no one majority party then the formation of a coalition government functions as a runoff. That's a built-in check on the power of a plurality executive.

[muon2]

It's time for the popular vote to determine the President.  Period.

I still contend that it should require a runoff if there is no majority, as France does for its president. A plurality president would not be advisable when the executive has such strong powers. We often overlook that since the two party system is so ingrained. But there's nothing that prevents the US from having more than two strong parties (perhaps except the EC).

Parliamentary democracies don't have to worry about that since a government needs over 50% of the members to form. If there is no one majority party then the formation of a coalition government functions as a runoff. That's a built-in check on the power of a plurality executive.

I don't know if I would agree to this, but I would say that if the top two candidates get over 90% combined, there should not be a runoff.

Should that still be true if the candidates were statistically tied with neither over 50%. By statistically tied I mean that given the limits of our accuracy of vote counting the winner can only be determined by arbitrary means such as stopping the count on some particular day. The Franken - Coleman race in 2008 was such a statistical tie as was the presidential vote in FL in 2000.