During the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton and Madison couldn't agree on what kind of president they wanted -- or how to choose one. So they turned it over to the states, giving the legislatures free rein to decide how to allot their electoral votes. After many twists and turns, we ended up with our present mongrel system: We take enormous pains to tally every vote but then allow most of them not to count.
The skunk in the garden party of democracy is the winner-take-all rule that 48 of the 50 states use (not Maine and Nebraska), although the Founders never envisaged it. For most of our history, it didn't systematically warp our politics, although it did allow minority candidates to win a fair number of presidential elections. But over the past several decades, as the country has settled into an evenly divided and fairly ideologically coherent two-party system, it has meant that, in running for re-election in 2004, George Bush didn't even bother to poll in 32 of the 50 states -- because he knew they were either lost to him or certain.
The cult of the battleground state, as intensified by the obsession with the swing voters who are assumed to deliver those states, relegates most of the country (and virtually all of the voters) to invisibility. Presidential candidates, campaigns, and first-term presidents, just don't care about most of us. In 2008, the presidential candidates, neither of them an incumbent, spent two-thirds of their time in just six states.
No Republican presidential campaign worries about voter registration or turnout in Texas. No Democrat sweats Massachusetts. A tiny handful of voters in Ohio, Florida, or even Nevada and Iowa, matter more than huge voting blocks of African-Americans in Mississippi and Alabama.
But because Madison and Hamilton couldn't agree and knew they were leaving a mess, they also left a solution. The states can -- and often do (Massachusetts almost a dozen times) -- change how they allocate their electors. The solution on the table today is the National Popular Vote. State legislatures are gradually joining a compact among themselves. Once states with more than half the electoral votes have joined, all of their electoral votes will go to the candidate who wins the popular vote. Every vote would count equally in every state in every election.
National Popular Vote doesn't abolish the Electoral College -- but it does perfect it by ensuring that we will never again elect a president who got fewer votes than his or her opponent did, and that both parties will have the incentive to campaign equally hard for every one of our votes. Thirty-one legislative chambers in 21 states have adopted NPV, and the reform is halfway to the magic number -- states representing 270 electoral votes.
It's one of the few political reforms around that seems to be garnering significant bipartisan support -- because leaders of both parties in the majority of the states that get ignored in the present system would like their voters to count.
Most of its serious detractors are on the right. Phyllis Schlafly and her Eagle Forum loathe it -- apparently, they are fixated on the fact that National Popular Vote would have sent Al Gore to the White House.
Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also hates it, calling it "an absurd and dangerous idea," allegedly because in 1960 it would have a required a recount to see whether Nixon or Kennedy won the election. (In 1960, there was a recount in Hawaii. And, if Nixon had asked for one, there would have been one in Illinois, too. What's so dangerous?) But, really, McConnell hates it because it is faithful to the common, majoritarian ideals of both Hamilton and Madison.
What the Founders would find absurd and dangerous is the anti-popular form of politics over which McConnell currently presides. McConnell's vision of democracy (like that of today's House Republicans) builds on Newt Gingrich's subversive innovation, a system of parliamentary discipline in which Republican members of Congress owe their fealty to their party, not their electors. McConnell has added the distortion of the Senate's traditions of extended debate to create a permanent minority veto -- explicitly rejected by all of the Founders -- of all legislative action, combined with the use of that veto to blackmail the majority into accepting policy proposals that have neither public nor adequate Congressional support to pass on their own. George III never enjoyed the ability to thwart the popular will in his parliament that McConnell has in today's Senate -- and McConnell's vision is to translate that ability to the White House as well.
The next time we elect a minority president, there will be a massive public outcry to get rid of the Electoral College. National Popular Vote gives us a simple way to preserve state leverage over presidential elections without amending the Constitution but still protecting us against electing a minority president. If you really line up with either Madison or Hamilton, you ought to like it.