As close followers of US politics know, the US does not elect its president by direct popular vote. Instead it has an institution called the Electoral College whose members vote for the president. The electoral college consist of 538 votes apportioned among the states corresponding exactly to the total of their members of the House of Representatives (that varies with the population) and comes to 435 total plus two each for the Senate, that gives 100 more. The extra three votes
consist of two for Puerto Rico and one are for Washington DC. This means that the winner has to get 270 electoral college votes.
Each state gets to decide how its electoral college members should vote for the presidency and almost all of them have a winner-take-all policy in which whichever candidate gets the plurality within the state gets awarded all the votes. This can lead to a situation in which one candidate can get the majority in the electoral college while a different one gets the majority vote nationally. This happens rarely but the most recent case was in the 2000 election.
Some have argued that the electoral college is an anachronism that should be abandoned but changing it requires amending the constitution, and that is unlikely to happen since the change is fiercely rejected by especially those so-called ‘swing states’ such as Ohio and Florida that love the enormous and undeserved attention they get during the elections.
But there is a way out of this problem and that is the National Popular Vote Compact in which states are invited to change their internal rules so as to give all their votes, not to the winner in their particular state, but to the winner of the national vote. If states that have a total of 270 electoral college votes sign on, then the old system gets essentially bypassed.
Ben Jacobs writes that we are slowly getting there. New York seems to be on the verge of joining nine other states and Washington DC, making 165 votes in all. Apparently Oklahoma and Connecticut are moving towards it too. The movement only started in 2007 so this is pretty rapid progress.
Jacobs thinks that 2016 may be the last election under the old system but I disagree. As it gets closer to the magic 270 number, opposition will get fiercer and progress will slow, if not stall. It may eventually win out but I suspect it will take much longer than Jacobs thinks.