The Electoral College

This is from yesterday but I didn't quite get to it.
Matthew Frank at NRO examined the Electoral College and the recent initiative in California to split the state's votes by Congressional District, with the state's winner taking the 2 votes representing its US Senators. (The total of each state''s congressional delegation is the same as the number of its electoral votes).
Personally, I'm in favor of the idea, but only if implemented nationally. Only Maine and Nebraska allow for such split voting, all other states in the union grant all the votes to that state's winner of the presidential election.

Unfortunately, the Constition spells out that only the state legislatures can decide on how to apportion a state's votes. This California initiative is a voter sponsored referendum. Naturally, the Democrats are crying foul - if Califonia split its vote in the last election, it would have cost John Kerry 22 electoral votes from the California districts that voted Republican. But as Frank points out, that is far from being a sure thing in the future, particularly after redistricting every ten years.

"Would redrawn congressional districts change the electoral map in presidential contests? Surely to some extent, and the district-tally system, if instituted in every state with at least two congressional districts, would create powerful incentives to rethink the virtue of gerrymandering for the sake of incumbent House members’ reelection. Our parties are famously adaptable to new institutional realities, and there is no reason to expect that the preceding “what-if” analysis of the last election, under rules that were not then in place, is a good predictor of what would happen one or two or three elections from now, if the new rules were actually adopted. Redistricting experts in both parties would quickly start to fiddle with the map to maximize geographically distributed strengths, yielding small but marginally predictable district-wide majorities. This would risk more House seats but help in presidential elections. Could the Democrats find more voters for their candidates on a more distributed basis? They would surely try."

He also points out that a change many Democrats prefer, one in which the winner of the national popular vote takes each state's (those that make the change, anyway) electoral votes, regardless of that state's outcome, would probably benefit the Democratic party due to its preponderance in many urban centers. A change of this nature would also have far larger impacts on the two party system, perhaps irrevocably weakening it in favor of fringe party alliances which could "hold hostage" the larger parties by threatening to withdraw support at critical political junctures, much like European parliamentary systems. He also wonders what impact a Florida 2000 situation might look like if this were implemented at a national level, and doesn't like imagining it - neither do I.

In short, the Electoral College, for all its supposed faults, has served the nation pretty well, and tinkering with it may have far reaching and unintended consequences.
Those crazy old elitist white males that founded the country didn't do such a bad job.