Can Anything Dislodge the Electoral College? Today's reformers join a long history of groups that have tried, and failed, to eliminate the institution.

• Author: Drutman, Lee

Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?

by Alexander Keyssar

Harvard University Press, 544 pp.

Of all the institutions in American politics, the Electoral College is surely the strangest. It never worked as its designers intended, and for more than 200 years, generations of aspiring reformers have lambasted its distortions and mounted heroic campaigns to replace it. And yet it still stands, only slightly modified, in all its Rube Goldberg curiosity. Which begs the obvious question that titles the Harvard historian Alexander Keyssar's new book, Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?

The short answer is that the constitution is really hard to amend, and virtually impossible when more than a third of senators or representatives think their states would do worse under new rules. And this has always been the case, for reasons ranging from preserving partisan advantages to preventing racial integration. As a result, our 18th-century peculiarity persists.

To fully explain how difficult the Electoral College is to dislodge, Keyssar chronicles more than two centuries of near-constant disputation and battle. On four occasions one chamber of Congress approved a constitutional amendment, only to see it fall short in the other. All of these came during times in which parties were ideologically confused and politics was uncertain enough to make even short-term advantages unclear--opportune times for constitutional change.

Today's reformers have found what they hope is a workaround: the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, under which states pass legislation that binds their electors to support the national popular vote winner. For the compact to take effect, states would have to collectively represent at least 270 Electoral College votes, the bare minimum necessary to win. As of this writing, 16 states, representing 196 electoral votes, have signed on.

It's a clever approach. But the Electoral College is a slippery target. In most political constituencies, opposition to the institution is fluid; with every elimination effort, the battle lines change. In each fight, critics of the institution earnestly call out its arbitrary distortions, and trumpet broad democratic norms of fairness and equality. But those distortions give some states and some constituencies more power than they'd otherwise have, and they are unwilling to give it up. Opponents always find some plausible principle--the value of federalism, a vague warning about some unintended consequence--on which to hang a defense. The Road Runner always gets away, despite Wile E. Coyote's cleverest schemes.

Keyssar begins in the summer of 1787, as the Framers were struggling mightily over how to elect a president. Some plans had the legislature picking the president, for a single term. Others favored a direct election, eager to see a more independent executive with closer ties to the people. After months of reversals and oscillations, the Electoral College emerged as "an eleventh-hour...