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This is one of the many reasons why the electoral college is so profoundly stupid.
In a world where elections are run by mutually-distrusting state governments, the logic of the electoral college (fixed number of EVs per state, allocated winner-takes-all) improves election security because it means there is nothing for a one-party state government to steal - to steal a presidential election you need to tamper with votes in a state with functioning two-party politics, which means committing multiple felonies with a sympathetic and politically powerful victim. The actual machinery of the electoral college is bad because it creates additional attack vectors (what happens if you blackmail or threaten an elector to vote faithlessly?) and creates additional process steps which take up time pointlessly, cutting into the time available for recounts and investigations.
A version of the electoral college where each state government cast its electoral votes directly (by certificate fedexed to the Capitol on January 5th, by Eurovision-style capitol-to-capitol video link of January 6th, or by some hypothetical future system of secure electronic communication between federal and state governments) would just work better. To avoid the Hawaii 1960 problem, you could require the state chief justice to countersign the certificate to confirm that there is no ongoing state court litigation that could change the vote.
I'll preface this by saying that I don't think statistically significant election fraud has ever happened for the presidential elections. For state elections I don't know. But in the counterfactual, isn't there a stronger incentive for precariously positioned swing state government officials to fix the vote in the hopes that the national party returns the favor through patronage than for a securely positioned official to risk their reputation?
Also, moving past the election security question and more directly addressing the "should we have an ec question"... If we're sticking to per-state voting and giving state governments even more power to shift things their way... Why not just return to the original way of doing things, where state governments selected electors directly? I'm strongly in favor of the popular vote because I don't think states are or should be discrete cultural-economic interests... But if we're going to treat them like they are, I would unironically prefer the old way of doing things because at least it forces people to care about local politics.
Does "except Illinois" go without saying nowadays?
I haven't heard about illinois election fraud. I've heard about their machine politics but thought that was the standard "not technically illegal" monopoly tactics.
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How so? With the national popular vote you encourage such vote inflation practices nationwide. Engaging in election security would be gimping your own state's votes, better to just have the election security of a subway turnstile during rush hour. A city of 100k produces 200k votes? All the better for amplifying the will of your state citizens.
All the incentives for rigging the vote already exist everywhere-- people want to win local elections too. But in truly national vote small state-level distortions have less effect on the overall total, and natiomal election-fixing rings have to deal with a fact that large secrets aare harder to keep.
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I actually have the opposite opinion: it prevents local shenanigans from swinging the overall vote except in niche cases (which admittedly have happened at least once in my lifetime in Florida). National popular vote means that any ballot box can be stuffed to swing the result, subject to mostly local rules on elections.
Although I will concede that it's disproportionate weighting of votes between states is probably not ideal.
The amount of ballots you can stuff (or otherwise compromise) is in either case proportional to what turnout "should" be for a given area. But the net effect is smaller if the race is decided by millions of voters versus thousands. Also, in a popular race you have to spread out the vote fixing over more overall states or people can catch your interference by looking for states where turnout is unusually high. Meanwhile in an EC race you can focus your operation on specifically the swing states, which have a built-in explanation for high turnout.
If you don't believe me, just look at the non-illegal "vote-fixing" measures the candidates have been using-- making all sorts of promises narrowly tailored toward swing state voter interests specifically.
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