Why the Electoral College Is Broken — And How to Fix It

The solution doesn’t require a constitutional amendment

Last week the New York Times’ Farhad Majoo wrote a column saying he’s voted in every election since 2000 and, as a Californian, “not once do I remember a presidential candidate ever making an effort to get my vote.” Thank the Electoral College, the system by which Americans elect their president and by which candidates from both parties see California as blue enough, or Texas as red enough, to ignore them on the campaign trail, which means their concerns are ignored in the Oval Office, too. I won’t detail the machinations of the Electoral College here. I assume you know them. What I’ll say instead is that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Any chance I get I recommend this essay from the Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Eric Foner. He showed how strange and anti-democratic the Electoral College is. No other country elects its chief executive as America does, even the countries whose constitutions U.S. officials helped write, like Germany and Japan’s. No other American election relies on the Electoral College. No one here really likes it anyway. We use it only because it was a back-room compromise at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and a way for Northern elites like Alexander Hamilton to deter the “tyrannical” threat of one-person one-vote populism. James Madison…