Over on MyLeftNutmeg there is a spirited discussion about the pros and cons of a National Public Vote for the election of the President. BlastFromGlast makes the point that ‘the franchise is not uniform from state to state’ and that ‘we cannot trust reported results’.

His concern about the difference in the franchise from state to state is an important one. Here in Connecticut, we have certain disadvantages when it comes to voting. We do not have election-day registration or early voting. On the other hand, we do have good voter turnout, a paper trail of votes, and we have provisions where felons who have served their time can become re-enfranchised.

Are these differences greater than the differences that the electoral college creates? The estimated population of Texas in 2007 is about 24 million. They have 34 electoral votes, or one elector vote for every 700,000 in the state. Wyoming, with 3 electoral votes, and a population of around half a million has one electoral vote for every 175,000 people in the state. In other words, each vote in Wyoming, if everyone in the state were voting, would have four times the impact as each person voting in Texas. I believe this far outweighs the differences in the franchise from state to state. This gets compounded when you narrow it down to swing voters in swing states. With that one or two states can make all the difference.

This has two negative effects. First, campaigns are going to focus more of their energy on these voters. Perhaps more importantly, it makes these states much more attractive targets for voter fraud. BlastFromGlast has argued that the electoral college is like compartmentalizing sections of a ship so that if one compartment becomes flooded, the ship doesn’t sink. The problem with this is that unless all the compartments are equal, a person looking to sink a ship only needs to find those compartments whose breeching would have the greatest effect on sinking the ship.

So, do we wait until the franchise is more uniform between the states? I believe it is wise to move towards a National Public Vote now, and fix up the problems along the way. Yet what system would work best? One idea that has been popular is for states to assign all of their votes to whomever wins the popular vote. There is a potential danger with this, however. If only a few states do this, then the incentive to campaign in those states is gone. A candidate would be wiser to campaign in states that have not made such a change, since the votes won there would be beneficial in the unchanged state, as well as in any states that have made the change.

One way to get around this, is to make the change effective only when a majority of the electoral votes will be cast that way. However, that might end up being the same as doing nothing.

Another approach to making states more competitive is to follow the example of Maine, where some of the electoral votes are assigned on a congressional district by congressional district basis. For states that have congressional districts that are highly competitive, it would at least make these congressional districts more attractive to national candidates. These two ideas could be combined in a collection of different ways, such as making assigning one electoral vote per congressional district with the remaining votes assigned based on either the popular vote in the state or nationwide, and with assigning all electoral votes based on the national popular vote when a majority of the states have agreed to such a provision.

When you get right down to it, there are a lot of complicated issues about how best to count the votes, and the more we think and talk about them, the more likely we are to find a better solution.