Drove through rural August County, VA yesterday and saw lots of Trump signs there. But then remembered that their votes will count as little as my Biden vote in Tennessee thanks to the Winner-Take-All element of the Electoral College. If we shifted to NC, our votes would matter.

This has always struck me as the most problematic part of the Electoral College. It's not the EC per se that's the problem. It's the awarding of Electors on a Winner Take All (WTA) basis that creates EV/PV splits and reduces elections to a handful of "swing states."

If we had a proportional allocation system, or non-gerrymandered Cong District system, we would see candidates campaign in every state, competing to meet the next threshold to get one more Elector.

This isn't any new revelation either. There have been complaints about it since the 12th Amendment failed to address it. It was during the Jeffersonian era that suffrage expanded and states awarded Electors based on statewide pop vote on a WTA basis.

In the chart above, "PV-S" means popular vote statewide. By the 1830s, only South Carolina failed to award Electors by statewide popular vote. Some states occasionally had split EVs still. NJ did in 1860. But most had gone to the system we have now.

The advantages of the EC are that they help with any recounts or irregularities since elections are done at state level. And they "force" majorities by squeezing out third parties like Ross Perot, who got 19% of the PV and zero Electoral Votes. Less need for House tie breakers.

A proportional system would need a mechanism to deal with third parties. Perhaps instant runoff/ranked choice. Or maybe a minimum threshold to get any Electors. Also, the House should be expanded in size to more properly reflect the population difference between CA/TX and WY/VT.

The biggest danger this election cycle is not "cheating." The biggest danger is if Trump wins the EC but loses the PV by even more than in 2016. The message it would send would be that voters in non-swing states just have no influence with their vote unless they move.

Since PV/EV splits have never happened in two cycles in a row, we've never had to confront the possibility that the imbalance is anything more than a one-off quirk (usually following a coalition shift where one candidate was caught off guard). But two in a row would be very bad.

The hellscape maps with 269-269 are fun to discuss, but the prospect of Biden winning the PV by 5 million votes and losing the EC could pose a legitimacy crisis. When large numbers of people conclude their votes don't matter, they are likelier to turn to other means.

That could mean schemes like 200,000 New York Dems changing their addresses to Pennsylvania - including getting a PA photo ID - just to be able to vote in a swing state. (Same with Chicagoans in WI, etc.). Of course, this gets close to "Lecompton"-level fraud from the 1850s.

I found evidence of this in Boyle County, KY in 1870. Rural residents bought cemetery plots and town strips so they could vote in Danville municipal elections. But that was for local elections. Either way, this is a terrible way to elect a President. And it could get very ugly.

The other advantage of the EC over a true national popular vote is that it prevents running up the score in one or two high population states. But that could easily be addressed by awarding Electors proportionally by state, with perhaps a minimum threshold for "any" Electors.

Even though the set of swing states changes ever so slightly from election to election, there are still only a handful that could conceivably matter. At most, voters in 10 states will have "any" real impact. That is not how the Founders intended. Nor does it work today.

So even if we avoid another EV/PV split, we really need to rethink how we elect the President. Our Constitution is great, but it's been amended 27 times, mostly for very good reasons. Changes can be done at the state level. But a Constitutional Amendment is most needed on this.