The Electoral College is flawed to its core. It is antiquated and serves no discernible purpose. It comes with no upside, but a lot of downside. The strongest argument for its ongoing existence is lousy tradition. The only argument, really, is just that we’ve been doing it this way for a long time.

I should be a staunch supporter of the Electoral College—I am, after all, not just a fan but also a progenitor of gimmicky systems. Years ago, as the commissioner of a fantasy football league, I invented my own unnecessarily complicated method for determining the champion. “A simple popular vote?! Too obvious,” the founders sneered. “Standard-issue playoff scenario?! How dare you,” I scoffed.

It was a free league, so the actual stakes were nonexistent. Instead of using the standard ESPN format, I allowed every team in the playoffs. The catch was the top four teams were awarded additional points, to be tacked on to their final “earned” score each week. First place got 35 points added to their tally. Second place got 25 bonus points, and so on. The idea was to extend the season for everyone, so that two-thirds of the league wasn’t eliminated with weeks of football to go, while also protecting the best teams from easy elimination. I anticipated some push-back from the top teams—why should they be exposed to potential defeat by a bottom-feeder team in a one-off playoff system after a season of dominance, I imagined they would gripe.

Instead, it was those at the bottom who complained the loudest. They thought the additional points awarded to the top teams were too steep. Imagine that—a 3-and-10 team complaining about playoff format! It somehow escaped their notice that these fuckers wouldn't even be in the playoffs at all if it weren't for my system! Ungrateful ingrates! I should have banished them from the league! From life, even!

Anyhow, much to the chagrin of the ungrateful few, the system worked. Everyone played meaningful fantasy football for longer than the standard format would have allowed, and the best teams benefited from the additional points, with the eventual champion coming from the deserving upper crust of the league.

So, gimmicky systems can work. Unfortunately, the Electoral College is not one of those systems.

The Electoral College is, in many ways, a solution in search of a problem. Worse still, it creates new problems: it suppresses voter turnout, and it sometimes distorts the will of the people.

On the turnout front, the Electoral College system suppresses the vote by capping the influence of each vote within a state. Once a candidate reaches a majority vote share, there is no utility in any additional vote. The margins don't matter. If you're a Democrat in Nebraska, or a Republican in New York, you might as well stay home. Your vote won’t make any difference at all.

Under the current system, some states matter more than others. Not because those states are big or small, but because those states are competitive while most of the others are not. In every presidential election, especially in the modern era, a handful of “battleground states” suck up all of the oxygen. The rest of the country is neutered into insignificance. If the current trend holds, and people continue to live in ideologically-based "bubble" states in ever greater numbers, then you'll have even fewer competitive states. It'll be down to Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Georgia deciding who becomes president, while all the other Electoral College votes are locked in for one party's candidate or the other, regardless of who the candidates actually are.

On the "will of the people" front, the Electoral College has produced five results where the losing candidate in the popular vote won the presidency (see chart below). Just in the last 20 years, it's happened twice. Over the next 20 years, it's bound to happen again, and it may not be by the relatively small margins we’ve seen recently.

In 2016, NPR ran a story about the lowest percentage of total votes a candidate could receive and still win the Electoral College. If a candidate won a one-vote majority in just the eleven biggest states, that candidate could win the presidency with a mere 27% of the national popular vote. And if a candidate won by a single vote in the smallest 40 Electoral College states, they could ascend to the presidency with just 23%(!) of the national popular vote. Now, the chance of that happening is vanishingly small—the margins would have to be cartoonishly thin in some states, yet absurdly large in others, for the same candidates. But it could theoretically happen. And a system that allows for such a small percentage of voters to exert such consequential influence over the majority does not comport with a federal government that is ostensibly representative of the will of the people.

To that point, the Electoral College system does not have a population floor (or ceiling) for each state—the candidate with the most votes in that state gets the Electoral College votes for that state, no matter how big or small the vote tally. Let’s suppose an unforeseeable event reduced the population of a state such as South Dakota to three people. Perhaps a small cult invaded the state, like what happened to Oregon in the documentary Wild Wild Country. Only this time, instead of a goofy religious sect taking over a small town and busing in a bunch of homeless people from all over the country to tilt the electoral map in their favor, the cult members go around relentlessly farting in front of people—and I mean, relentlessly—to the point that everyone else decides to leave the state entirely. Only the three most prodigious farters remain, stewing in the enjoyable climes of their own brands—and enjoying more (relative) political power than anyone else in the country. The South Dakota Butt-Vapor Terrorists now have three electoral votes. Some system!

One of the arguments for the Electoral College that isn’t tied to mere tradition is that it promotes federalism, or some such, because each state voices its choice for president as one. (All but Maine and Nebraska apportion their electoral votes in winner-take-all fashion.) But the president doesn’t represent the states—the president represents the people. The Senate more than adequately carries the burden of state representation at the federal level.

President Jed Bartlet (swoon!) once said that “there are times when we’re 50 states, and there are times when we are one country.” Voting for president is one of those times when we are one country. It’s the one vote that appears on every ballot in the country every four years. Everywhere you go, the president goes with you. That’s not true of your member of Congress. That’s not true of your governor. That’s not true of your mayor.

So what system would be better than what we have now? Almost anything else, really. But if we're talking about an ideal system, I can think of no better option than a popular vote, using a ranked-choice system. In a national election where every vote actually counts, more people would be convinced to show up to vote, no longer dissuaded by the reality of being overwhelmingly politically outnumbered in their place of residence. This would incentivize turnout not just for the top of the ballot, but also encourage engagement for all the down-ballot stuff, increasing citizen participation in state elections and amendments, and special-purpose local-option sales taxes, and how early you should be able to drink on Sunday, and what-have-you.

If, for some reason, the beautiful simplicity of a national popular vote is lost on most people, and we absolutely must keep the current system, we should at least make some changes to address the more glaring weaknesses. Being the pragmatist that I am, I have a proposal that would do just that. It keeps the Electoral College largely intact, and is fairly simple to implement: The Overriding Trigger Clause, or The People’s Veto.

A Second Path to Victory

Under the current system, the winner of the Electoral College wins the presidency. That’s it. Whether with 23% or 27% or 31% or 46% of the popular vote, no matter—the will of the people can fuck right off. Did you think this was some sort of democracy, or something?! (Oh, do shut up.)

But in my proposed system, the winner of the Electoral College wins the presidency UNLESS a candidate wins the popular vote by either:

1. A majority share of the vote, OR

2. A plurality of the popular vote by a margin greater than 5%

If a candidate reaches one of these two thresholds despite losing the Electoral College, the popular vote overrides the Electoral College result, and that candidate becomes the president. The popular vote puts them over the top.

This “overriding trigger” will be called The People's Veto for marketing purposes, because the people love shit named after themselves.

This is the least disruptive proposal (that I can think of) that sidesteps the need to overhaul the Constitution while also preventing the worst-case scenario—a candidate winning a majority of the votes, or winning by a significant margin, but still losing the election. With this modification, everyone’s vote will truly count. With this modification, South Dakota won’t be able to unduly influence the result with their notorious, state-clearing flatulence.

It should be noted that this modification to the existing rules would not have made Hillary Down-Home Clinton or Al ManBearPig Gore the president, both of whom won the popular vote, but by a slim plurality. Nor would it have awarded the presidency to Grover ‘Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa?’ Cleveland in 1888. None of those candidates reached either trigger-point (see chart).

In fact, The People’s Veto would change the outcome of a presidential election just once in American history—in 1824, Andrew Total Shithead Jackson would have defeated John Quincy Adams, with a popular vote victory margin of over ten percent.

No system is perfect.