Don't Have to Get Rid of Electoral College

This is a very short one. I am listening to this episode of The Daily, about the electoral college. The talk is about why it’s so hard to get rid of. But in the course of the show, it points out that the electors were given no rules about how to vote, relative to the votes of their state.

What happened was that early on, a convention called “winner take call” took hold, so that all the electoral votes go to the winner. Well—that was a convention. Where removing the electoral college would take a constitutional amendment, this convention is literally—in that other sense—a convention. It could just as well be using a different convention, such as a proportional distribution. This would still not have the granualrity of direct representation, but other than that, it would be infinitely more fair.

How come nobody’s talking about that?

Later in the Daily story, the journlist does mention something called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.