From what I read is that republican led states usually make it harder to vote than democratic states, but I haven’t looked further into this.

Although maybe you technically actually are only voting for the elector in your state that then casts their vote on your behalf, I even read that there have been rare occasions where the state elector went against what their state voted for!?

This whole process of voting in the US seems very outdated to me (I am from Europe too). I know that it is hard to fundamentally change the system as long as nothing goes completely wrong. Germany had big loopholes in the constitution during the Republic of Weimar too. Changing this was easy after the total defeat during the Second World War. I have no idea how you could get through with updating the complete political system of a more or less „functional“ country. Even less if the country is as divided as the US is at the moment