"Because I Said So" Is Probably an Insufficient Reason

Listen, I think I know what's best for people living 219 years from now. After all, I'm on the fucking dolla dolla bill y'all.

As great as we think our system of government is, and as wise as we fancy our Founding Fathers, the way we elect our presidents is profoundly stupid. Only in the United States, the world's self-proclaimed leading democracy, could one candidate receive a clear majority of the votes, the other guy be declared the winner, and there is virtually universal assent to the outcome. At least in other nations, when the guy with fewer votes wins, he or she has to fudge the numbers to at least make it appear as though he or she received more votes than the other guy; in America, this process is obviated by the existence of the Electoral College.

There are three reasons to retain the Electoral College:

1. The framers of the Constitution provided for the appointment of electors with the duty of choosing the president. Since obviously the Founding Fathers were omnipotent supermen who could foresee the future and therefore establish rules and institutions capable of meeting all possible contingencies, there must be some compelling rationale for retaining the present system, even if we don't know what it could possibly be.
2. You reside in one of the handful of states characterized as a "battleground," and relish the attention lavished on you by the Republican and Democratic presidential candidate.
3. You are a Republican who has "learned the lesson of 2000," and can't conceive of the possibility that one day the tables could be turned. Like, say, Rhode Island Governor Donald Carcieri.

The National Popular Vote bill is a proposed interstate compact whereby member states consent to allot their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote; the measure would take effect only when a number of states possessing an aggregate 270 electoral votes between them sign on. Four states - Hawaii, New Jersey, Illinois, and Maryland - representing 50 electoral votes have adopted the NPV thusfar. Rhode Island was poised to be next, until the aforementioned Governor Carcieri scotched the deal, thus incurring the wrath of Hendrik Hertzberg, who delivers a well-reasoned riposte ("Small State, Small Mind", dag yo) to Carcieri's ill-informed, eliding veto message, which you can and should read in its entirety.

For my part, I will note that no other elective office in our nation, to my knowledge, is filled by dint of a mechanism similar to the Electoral College. In every other instance, the voters, that is to say we, go into the booth and select the person we believe best for the job, and at the end of the day the votes are totaled and he or she who has a plurality - or, in some instances, a majority - wins. It's good enough for offices from the school board to the U.S. Senate, and it is fundamentally simpatico with our shared ideal of an educated electorate being able to select a government of their choosing. I therefore see no compelling reason why we should accept a system of electing presidents governed by an anachronism designed to protect the parochial interests of thirteen fractious, loosely-confederated polities 220 years ago. Of course I'm not the ghost of James Madison or Thomas Jefferson, so what the hell do I know?