Electoral College: any changes coming?

[angus]

First, one can make the argument that the Founders' expectations were that the election would be decided in the House.  Initially, there were many candidates in the quadrennial elections and it was difficult to get a majority in the EC.

Secondly, there's no a priori expectation of popular vote mandates.  For example we don't elect most justices.  We can accept that one of the three branches is not popularly elected; this indicates that it may not be such a difficult mental stretch to imagine we can accept that two of three branches are not.  This is neither good nor bad.  Just the way it is.

Third, remember that the EC was a reasonable attempt at Federalism, much like some of the bizarre formulations for distribution of authority in what the European Steel and Coal Union has evolved into.  It is noteworthy that in the early literature the phrase was "These United States are..." and by around 1845 it had been almost entirely supplanted by  "The United States is..."  And this was well before the strong-central-government vs. states-rights issue was finally settled at the point of a bayonnet.    Except in the minds of those who belong to  extreme states-rights groups (Libertarians, Constitutionalists, the Brookings Institute, etc.), the supremacy of DC over the various legislatures is a given.  This, too, is neither good nor bad, just evolution.  But we shouldn't forget the original intentions of the framers.

That said, I'm of two minds when it comes to the EC.  On the one hand, that one candidate can win a plurality of the actual voters' votes and still lose is a bit unsettling.  On the other, if ever there was a case in favor of the current state-by-state system, the 2000 general election was it.  When one guy gets 48 plus or minus a percent and the other guy gets 48-point-something plus or minus a percent (that's what most folks call a tie), there's likely to be serious calls for recounting.  In our current system, the recounts were localized in two small states (NM, where gore eventually won by 360 votes!  IA, where gore eventually won by 4000) and one large (FL, where bush won by 185 if you counted them the way the bushies wanted, bush won by 1500 if you count them the way gore wanted, or 587, if you count them the way Katherine Harris wanted.)  As it is, we didn't have a winner till December 12.  Can you imagine how it would have been if we had been required to do a nation-wide recount of 105 million votes?!  There's a good chance that we may not have had a victor by innauguration day.

Still, like most folks, I'm undecided about whether the current system best fits.  Recall that more amendments have dealt with the issue of how we pick our national CEO than any other issue.  I think the suggestion of getting rid of the vertical offset (y-intercept as it were) of 2 extra votes for the number of senators and keeping the slope (no, that's not an ethnoracial slur, I mean the geometric change in y, or electoral votes, with x, the population).  But, as a serious practical matter, everyone seems to agree that change is unlikely since it involves amending the constitition.