We begin today’s roundup with several pieces outlining why it’s time to fix our broken Electoral College system. First up, Nate Cohn at The New York Times:
The true quirkiness of the Electoral College comes from how states award their votes, not how many votes each state has: It’s (largely) winner-take-all. [...]
The winner-take-all bias that elevates the battleground states overruns all of the other biases. If the big states were close and competitive, the big states would decide our elections — as they did until fairly recently. In 1888, another time there was a split between the popular vote and the Electoral College, the candidate who prevailed (Benjamin Harrison) swept the nation’s largest states — including its largest, New York, by one percentage point. [...] What’s so interesting is that this defining feature is largely unintended. It’s not specified in the Constitution. [...]
If states chose to, they could devise an electoral system that better reflected the popular vote. They could award their electors in proportion to the statewide popular vote, or to the winner of the national popular vote, as some states have sought to do through an interstate compact.