winning electoral vote but losing popular vote

I agree. I find it amusing when I win the electoral college and lose the popular vote by maybe three hundred votes (with over two hundred million votes counted!) and the post-election analysis says I won "even though I didn't get the support of most voters"!

It's also interesting to note that the voting turnout is always unusually high, possibly a 100% turnout, which would be possible in the real world only if laws were passed where voting was obligatory. I wonder if this were the case in reality, if it wouldn't happen more often that the electoral votes and popular votes would disagree. After all, if every eligible voter votes in every state, the big blowouts wouldn't change the electoral vote margin at all but would definitely alter the popular margin.

There should be an option where one can determine (just as difficulty level, etc.) how high or low turnout is to be, with the norm being what usually happens, and high turnout (100%) to low turnout. It would be interesting to see how that would alter strategy.

I also like the randomizing options, except that the number of total electoral votes is always very high. It would be nice if one could choose their own population scenarios and play with various situations such as: each state has one vote (even though 3 is the minimum in reality) and it's a best of fifty situation; where 47 states total the same electoral votes as three big states which are broken evenly among conservative, liberal, and battleground. So forth and so on.  

I just lost one by 12 million votes yet won the election, 300 votes is nothing!  I'm not sure they've got it at 100% turnout (and clearly this changes from one game to the next) but they do have it higher than it should reasonably be.  The electoral vote alteration thing might be interesting too, you could set it up so that there are no Senators in the formula (so each State has two fewer electoral votes) reducing the power of the small states, or maybe you could set States to a PR system like Nebraska and Maine do to split electoral votes by Congressional District.  The major problem still stands, the fact that I just won an election while losing the popular vote by 12 million is absurd and unless they change that the game's designers should be embarrassed.  I wouldn't be at all bothered if the game were designed so that it never happened, after all, it has only happened I beleive 3 times in the entire history of the United States, and once since 1900.  The one by the way, being a false analysis anyway since a fair counting of all votes in Florida would have resulted in a Gore Presidency in 2000, so that one isn't even entirely accurate to say that the popular and electoral votes disagreed.

4 times.  jackson, tilden, cleveland, gore.

side fun fact: thats why Obamas the 44th president.  Cleveland gets counted twice be cause he won.  then lost while winning the popular. then got re-elected.  jackson got screwed in congress, and tilden was the victim of a "corrupt bargin" in congress.   gore, well, you know what happened there...