The Electoral College needs overhauling. Here’s why.

Imagine a world in which Hillary Clinton was Donald Trump’s vice president. Or Donald Trump was Joe Biden’s. Impossible to conjure? Funny, that’s exactly what would have happened if the original Constitution as ratified in 1788 applied today.

Under the original system of “electors” — the Constitution never mentions an “Electoral College” — the candidate who received a majority of their votes became president. Simple so far. The twist? According to Article II, Section I, the runner-up was vice president. In 2016, Trump won 304 electoral votes, Clinton 227. So they would have been president and vice president. In 2020, Biden won 306 to Trump’s 232. So, a Biden-Trump team. Who in the world would have wanted either one of these outcomes?

The founders certainly didn’t want anything like that. In fact, Congress passed an amendment within a generation of the new Constitution expressly to stop it. We can change how we elect the president because we have already done it many times in our history. That includes how the Electoral College functions. It’s time for an update. Let’s explore why.

In our opinion pages the other day, we published a Wall Street Journal essay in which former George W. Bush strategist Karl Rove made an important observation. Because we pick our president indirectly through the Electoral College rather than a popular vote, only seven states will likely decide who is president in November. The other 43 won’t really matter, including the biggest states like Florida, California, Texas and New York, who will almost certainly give all of their electoral votes, respectively, to Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Trump and Biden. It’ll be just like in 2020, where if you wanted your vote to matter, you were out of luck if you were one of the more than 6 million Californians (34%) who voted for Trump or one of the 5.3 million Floridians (48%) who voted for Biden.

As Rove pointed out, that means the election of the president could turn on issues of merely parochial importance in those seven states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. As examples, Rove cited the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste facility in Nevada, natural-gas production in Pennsylvania and water issues in Arizona. The seven swing states, while hardly tiny, still have one fewer electoral vote than the two largest ones, California and Texas. Whether we love or loathe this system, California, Texas, New York and Florida are basically out of the picture, and that doesn’t feel right. Nor does it seem like representative government, certainly not one person, one vote.

It’s easy to forget how much the framers were feeling their way in the dark and experimenting — and how much they didn’t know. For example, most of them, including George Washington, originally hated the idea of political parties, derisively calling them “factions,” and thought their new Constitution could create a government that would function without them. D’oh!

In 1787, there were kings, queens, parliaments and prime ministers, but nations didn’t have presidents — a “Chief Magistrate of the United States,” as Alexander Hamilton called the office in Federalist #68 — or a way to choose them. Some wanted Congress to pick the president. Some wanted the states’ governors to do so. Some wanted a popular vote; others didn’t particularly trust “the people” to make such an important decision themselves. So like so many other things in the new Constitution, they settled on a compromise, which became what we know as the Electoral College — an indirect election of the president in which each state chooses electors who, in turn, choose (or “chuse,” as the Constitution spells it) the president. It’s correct to say “each state,” not “voters.” In early years, it was mostly state legislatures, not voters, who chose the electors who then picked the president.

Of course, voting of any kind was usually restricted to white male property owners over 21. A lot has changed. One thing that hasn’t is how Electoral College votes are divvied up among the states. Each state gets a number of electors equal to its number of representatives in the U.S. House plus its two senators. That gives a structural advantage to smaller states because states always have two senators even if they have only one representative. The smallest states (today that is Alaska, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Delaware) all get three electoral votes no matter how tiny their population.

Is that fair to any larger state, whose votes count less? No, but the states who ratified the Constitution knew that, so at least that inequality was accepted, understood and baked into the original agreement. (Of course, so was the egregious Three-fifths Compromise, which allowed slave states to count each enslaved person as three-fifths of a free person for determining a state’s representation in Congress — and its numbers of electors. In other words, the slave states increased their political power by counting people they viewed as property and never dreamed of as voters.)

The 37 states who joined the union later played under those same rules of disproportionate representation, and the spread only got worse. The difference in scale between the 1790 population of the largest free state Pennsylvania (434,373) and tiny Delaware (59,096) was 7.35 times. That’s nothing like today’s California (39 million) and Wyoming (584,057) — where California has almost 67 times the population. Here’s the math: It takes 721,578 people to count as one electoral vote in California, but only 194,686 in Wyoming. In case you were wondering, it’s even worse in fast-growing big states like Texas and Florida, where the Census only catches up with our growth every 10 years. In Florida, it’s at least 753,691 people per electoral vote.

The thing to remember is states don’t vote, but people in states do. When some argue that they don’t want big states like California to throw their weight around and swing presidential elections, they should remember the millions of California Republicans whose voices are silenced when the state gives all its electoral votes to the Democrat. Could the system change? Of course it could. Even the founders started correcting some of their errors within a few years — and suggested other fixes that never came to pass.

Aaron Burr and Thomas Jefferson tied in the Electoral College in 1800. At that time, each elector got two votes. The original idea was one vote was for president, the other for vice president, but the Constitution didn’t spell out any such distinction. That meant that each of the elector’s two votes were counted as a vote for president, period. The top vote-getter became president and the runner-up vice president, no matter what the elector’s intentions were. A bit of a problem.

Since Burr, who was running for vice president, and Jefferson, who was running for president, got the same number of electoral votes, the U.S. House had to break the tie, but it took 36 rounds of voting before Jefferson won. Barely a decade into the new Constitution, there had been a meltdown.

Soon, the 12th Amendment was adopted, requiring electors to cast separate ballots for president and vice president. (Even though the presidential and vice presidential candidates have run as a ticket since the 19th century, electors still vote separately for president and vice president.) That was only the first of many changes. Over the years, more states began using the popular vote rather than their state legislatures to choose their presidential electors. However, most states made it winner take all, no matter how close the vote was. That system upset James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” so much that by 1823 he suggested amending the Constitution to set up smaller districts to choose electors, rather than letting entire states vote as a bloc. He wasn’t alone. According to the National Archives, Congress has seen more than 700 proposals to reform or eliminate the Electoral College — and more constitutional amendments suggested on the Electoral College than any other subject.

In 1968, George “Segregation Now, Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever” Wallace won 46 electoral votes in the Nixon-Humphrey election, opening the possibility of no candidate winning an electoral majority and raising the specter of electoral vote trading or throwing the presidential election to the U.S. House, where each state’s delegation would have one vote. None of that happened, but it unsettled enough people that the next year, the House voted overwhelmingly for an amendment to replace the Electoral College with a direct popular vote, and it had the backing of 80% of the public. But Sen. Strom Thurmond and two other segregationists viewed it as suspicious civil rights legislation that would dilute the white vote, engineered a filibuster in the Senate and killed it.

Polls since the 1960s have shown strong backing to abolish the Electoral College. Current support is at 65%, according to a Pew Research survey last fall. But the bar to amend the Constitution is high, and the efforts always stall. They probably will forever fail until both parties have the experience of winning the popular vote but losing the Electoral College — and the presidency. In modern times — in 2000 and 2016 — that has happened only to Democratic candidates. Imagine the sudden bipartisan support for a change if it went the other way a few times.

Of course, the states themselves could fix this without touching the Constitution. All but Maine and Nebraska embrace the winner-take-all system, which is what skews today’s politics and will probably leave the presidency in the hands of only seven states this fall. For example, states could apportion electors by which candidates won each of the state’s congressional districts. That would be better but because of gerrymandering, still not great. (For example, Florida has 20 Republican and eight Democratic congressional districts, far from the state’s Trump-Biden 2020 vote split, which was 51-48.) Or they could divvy up the electors by the percentage of the vote each candidate receives. But until most states do it, few states will do it. After all, why would blue California give a third of its electoral votes to Trump to reflect his vote total in the state unless red Florida agreed to give nearly half to Biden to mirror his vote total here? You can see the problem. No one wants to go first.

Many people discuss another workaround, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, in which states agree to give all of their electoral votes to the national winner of the popular vote. But while many states have agreed to the compact, it wouldn’t take effect until it passes in enough states to equal an Electoral College majority. California and New York passed it a decade ago or more. However, Florida and Texas aren’t about to. That means we’ll be left to the whims of voters in seven states who could well pick a president based on a local issue that doesn’t matter much to the rest of the country.

In the real world, this isn’t going to change even if it’s unfair — and very distant from the ideal of one person, one vote. No, it’s only going to change when enough people in both parties — and enough voters of no party, as the framers had hoped all would be — feel the system is working against them.

In the meantime, remember that the framers and founders themselves started adapting the Constitution quickly as they saw their theories of government butting up against the actual practice. Even Madison, a moving force behind the Constitution, wanted to amend his handiwork to make the Electoral College more representative. If a major framer saw the flaws in his own creation, why don’t we? What will it take?

Jim Verhulst is the deputy editor of editorials at the Tampa Bay Times.

Editor’s note: What do you think? Do you like the Electoral College or should it be revamped, vanquished entirely — or left as it is? Send us a letter to the editor using our letters portal by going to tampabay.com/opinion/submit-letter. That is a web address, not an email address. Please use the phrase “Electoral College” in the “Subject” line.