Like I said earlier... I could get behind a popular vote, but ONLY under a different voting system. Not with FPTP. Not the least of which is the ability of a majority with bad ideas to ruin it for everyone.
If you only have one president at a time, then all possible fair voting systems for presidents are effectively FPTP.
Why is that? I know of numerous non-FPTP voting and vote-counting methods.
- FPTP - vote for only one candidate
- Approval - can vote for more than one candidate
- Range, rated, score - like approval, but votes can have partial strength
- Ranked - rank the candidates from most to least preferred
For FPTP, approval, and rated voting, one adds up all the votes, though for rated voting, there is an alternative called "majority judgment", which is to compare the median votes for each candidate. Cumulative voting is a variation of rated voting where each voter's total vote is at most some value.
For ranked voting, the most common procedure is instant runoff -- the winner is whichever candidate has a majority of top preferences, and if no candidate does so, then drop the candidate with the fewest top preferences and redo the count with that candidate ignored. Repeat until some candidate gets a majority.
An alternative is the Borda count, translating rankings into ratings with first preference = (number of candidates), second preference = (number of candidates) - 1, etc. and counting as for a rated vote.
Another is Condorcet methods. These turn the election into a virtual round robin, finding the number of times the voters rank each candidate above each other candidate, the "Condorcet matrix". One then tries to find the Cordorcet winner, the one who beats all the others in one-on-one contests. With circular preferences, there won't be a Condorcet winner, and there are various algorithms for finding a winner in such a case, some of them rather complicated.