Seen on the Boston Globe op-ed pages:
A bill pending before the Massachusetts House of Representatives and 47 other legislatures across the country would fix this by changing the Electoral College so that it reflects the votes of every person in all 50 states.
The plan would ensure that the candidate who wins the popular vote in all 50 states would be elected president. It would ensure that every person’s vote would be equally important, and that our leaders would be accountable to the nation as a whole, not just voters in a handful of battleground states.
The consequences of this broken system are dire: voter participation rates are among the lowest in the world, partisan mischief runs rampant in battleground states, and, of course, a candidate with fewer votes can be elected president. Four times in 55 elections the candidate who placed second in the popular vote has won the contest. In five of the last 12 presidential elections, a switch of a handful of votes in one or two states would have elected the candidate who did not receive the most popular votes nationwide.
I’m still leery of relying wholly on the popular vote, given our apparent inability to count votes in certain jurisdictions… but the focusing of the contest on battleground states, and the localized dirty tricks I would agree are downsides of the current system which ought to be ended.