Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

What has changed with the NY people is now they are staying for their 6 months + 1 day to avoid NY taxation. In the past, they'd go down for 3-4 months, travel some others, and remain NY residents.

They are fleeing high taxes, just like me. The difference is many of them will still vote the same way - and vote themselves into paying state taxes. It's ironic.

It's happening in Arizona too, with the CA crowd coming in.

100% correct.  And most of them openly say this. 

Not sure, maybe the poll tax they implemented there

What? 

Florida people voted quite clearly to lift the lifetime ban on felons voting.  In response, the Florida legislature implemented a scheme where felons couldn't vote if they owed money

I mean, yes, there is no question that the representative government has given way to more people voting directly. It's also irrelevant to my point, which is that our current system is undemocratic because it ensures largess swathes of the population are irrelevant, and makes large swathes of the population have votes that count more than others. If we implemented a system where, say, a black persons vote counts double, I imagine a lot of you would be apoplectic. But that's the system were have now, except substitute voters in random close states for black people.

I think I get your point, but I think that that phenomenon is to some degree inevitable in any decentralized system.  And we could probably see similar phenomena in elections for city council in a good-sized city.  There might be 10 council districts with 7 or 8 of them heavily weighted one way or another.  So it's the 2 or 3 swing districts that will determine which side is going to control the council.
The other way of doing it would be to have everyone in the city vote for all 10 spots on the council, which would perhaps be more democratic, but could well leave some parts of the city not represented at all.
A lot of cities, mine included, had to change their form of government in the '70 and '80s because their old way of running the city resulted in no blacks or other minorities ever getting elected.  There was not a city council, but a city commission. And the commission was made up of the various commissioners--police commissioner, fire commissioner, streets and roads commissioner, etc.  All those positions were filled by city-wide elections, and they were always white, nearly always white men.  But--I would argue--they were elected more democratically than the way we do it now.
"Most democratically" doesn't necessarily mean "best way of doing it."

I could not agree more.

I still believe the 17th amendment to be the worst thing legislatively ever done in this country. For years, I have advocated repealing the 17th amendment. Unfortunately, our educational system in this country is brainwashing our youth to the point where they don't even understand the basics of the founding of this great nation.

I tell my students every year that if I could wave a magic wand and change one thing about the Constitution it would be to repeal the 17th Amendment.  I'm pretty critical of the 16th Amendment too, but the 17th is much worse, IMO.

The appeal of repealing the 17th amendment is making state's units more powerful/influential?

The evils of the 17th Amendment are two.
1.  It removed the state governments' input into federal policy-making.
2.  It made the Senate much more like the House--representing much the same interests--so the "cooling saucer" effect became much less so.
So, yes, repealing it would return some power to the states.

Presidential elections are generally close.  How would we do a recount if one was needed nationally?

The greater ease of stealing a national election under a popular vote is one side-argument I have seen in favor of retaining the EC.