Other ways to fix the Electoral College

While I applaud the current effort to game and undermine the undemocratic Electoral College, I believe that Michael Lopez and others are correct in that Senate Bill 42 will also be undemocratic.

So, as an alternative, why not take a look and consider what Maine and Nebraska have already been doing? Both states split their votes so that their electoral votes more closely reflect their popular vote tallies. It may not be a perfectly democratic result, but should be a good step in the correct (democratic) direction.

The National Popular Vote movement is a simple answer to a complex problem, which is almost always a recipe for failure. It rests on the notion that the United States is (or should be) a single democracy of 325 million people. That is not how the country was formed, nor how it has existed for nearly 250 years.

We are a republic comprised of 50 states, tethered together by our Constitution. A bedrock of our country’s fabric is pluralism — the notion that we are best through the reconciliation of a diversity of experiences and perspectives. This can only be achieved by wide engagement across the spectrum of political beliefs and socioeconomic strata. A national popular vote system clearly risks alienating and disenfranchising a substantial portion of that political and socioeconomic spectrum, a fact that even its proponents acknowledge and, it seems, they do not care. Our country’s divisions will only widen, potentially to critical levels that make the current political divides appear minor skirmishes.

The current system is far from perfect.

Thoughtful modification of the Electoral College system, retaining some element of fixed representation combined with a greater share of representation tied to the popular vote, can preserve fundamental pluralism.