Flunk the Electoral College, Pass Instant Runoffs.

• Author: Anderson, John B.

The Presidential controversy in Florida has had one virtue: It has shown that too many of our electoral rules and practices are antiquated and unexamined. We must seize this once-in-a-generation opportunity to modernize and fully democratize our elections.

There is no better place to start than that peculiar institution, the Electoral College. The Electoral College fails to provide for majority rule and political equality. The Electoral College divides us on regional lines, undercuts accountability, dampens voter participation, and can trump the national popular vote. With current plurality rules, it can turn third party candidates into "spoilers," where voting for your favorite candidate can help elect your least favorite. All forward-looking Americans should embrace direct election of the President by a majority vote.

The candidate with the most votes is elected in every other federal contest--and in nearly all elections of any consequence here and abroad. But instead of a simple national vote, the Presidency is decided by fifty-one separate elections in each state and the District of Columbia, with electoral votes allocated according to the size of each state's Congressional delegation. To maximize their clout, states have chosen to allocate their electoral votes by winner-take-all--the candidate who wins the most votes in a state, no matter what the margin or how small the percentage, wins all that state's electoral votes. (Maine and Nebraska, also allocate some of their electors according to the popular vote winner in U.S. House districts.)

A majority of Americans consistently support direct election of the President. Their concern about the anti-democratic nature of the Electoral College is grounded in history. Our framers distrusted democracy and saw the Electoral College as a deliberative body able to correct bad choices made by the people. They had the misplaced fear that, after the consensus election of George Washington, future Presidential elections would be divided along state lines, with candidates having only regional appeal and unable to win a majority of the electoral vote. The Electoral College, then, would convene and pick the best candidate among the people's "nominees." The belief of some of our framers that the college would check the excesses of majority rule are founded on a wildly mistaken understanding of how politics would evolve in the United States.

The rule for apportioning electoral votes according to the...