Fix the electoral college system already!

couple-ideas lesson of the day: if you sit on a good idea long enough, someone will write a piece for the NYTimes and claim the idea was his! Well, this so-called author was wrong on enough of the important points that his column is no longer what you might call a 'good idea.' This is the real deal:

Everyone knows the electoral college system is screwed-up. It was invented a long, long time ago to give U.S. citizens the impression that they were living in a democracy. The major problem with the system is, from time to time the person who most people vote for is not the one elected president. The most recent time this happened, one candidate received a half-million fewer votes than his opponent but became president anyway (we'll refer to him as W. to protect the innocent.. until proven guilty). I don't have enough space here to document how well that turned out, so I leave that to others..

Another really huge problem with the electoral college system is that most elections end up being determined in a handful of so-called swing states, places like Florida, Ohio, and Missouri. Now why should a vote in, say, Broward County, FL, count more than my vote? I believe this is a major reason for low voter turnout. Not only that, but the only times we get to actually see the candidates in the so-called 'blue' or 'red' states is during the primary when our vote still counts for something, or when they want our money. And then they take our political contributions and spend them in the swing states on TV commercials and whatnot trying to get every last couch potato to the polls.

To avoid fiascoes like this in the future, we really should have the popular vote determine the outcome of US presidential elections. But how do we bring that about? A constitutional amendment will never happen. The easy fix, as both I and the aforementioned NYTimes contributor suggest, is to have some of states change the way they allocate their electors. Below, I explain why his idea would perhaps make the problem worse, but first let me tell you about my idea:

My proposed fix is to have just a couple of states, say Texas and California, pair up and decide to allocate all their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. If the two states are big enough, and if one state is red and the other blue, the effect would be to break the electoral college hold on all the states at the same time. How would this work? If the 89 electoral votes of the two states I just mentioned are no longer taken for granted, but suddenly up for grabs, then every single vote by every citizen in every state suddenly counts! Not just the votes in the two states, but all of them, because it's the national popular vote that would matter. At that point the other states could fall in line and change their laws as well, as the dam would effectively be broken.

Why one red and one blue state? Because they don't trust each other, and neither side wants to risk their 'safe' votes for nothing. Why is this proposal much better than the current system in Maine and Nebraska, the one proposed by our NYTimes friend, or the one that California voters rightly turned down? Because they allocate electoral votes based on congressional districts within states. That sort of system just devolves the problem to a substate level, so votes in safe red or blue districts would no longer count; candidates would then visit only the 'swing' districts, as recently happened in Omaha; etc.. And imagine how much more contentious and political the process of redistricting would become.

If the election were based on the national popular vote, we wouldn't care about these ridiculous stories every four years about hanging chads, lost ballots, voter registration fraud, etc (unless it involves hundrend of thousands of votes). And mine and many other votes for president might count for the first time!