You're simply wrong about the reasons for the Electoral College. Really, who told you those things? Can you cite sources? Please, don't simply believe what some high school teacher rattled off one day ... look into it yourself.

Thanks to Heritage for exposing NPV and helping to educate the public about the benefits of our current system. No political system will ever be perfect, but the current Electoral College works much better than the proposed NPV interstate compact, which is either a recipe for eventual disaster or, more likely, a way to move toward more centralized control of election administration by the federal government.

It is simply not true that parliament is more democratic, as the amount of money spent campaigning has nothing to do with how democratic a process is. Blame a combination of big government (as power increases, it becomes worth more for people to influence the outcome) and that darned First Amendment.

So you don\'t mind if the winner has a plurality drawn heavily from one region of the country? You place no value on political stability or moderation? Maybe you\'re just a big fan of the French Revolution, that turned out well, didn\'t it?

The Electoral College allows the will of the people, filtered through the states using the exact same political calculus that is the basis for Congress, to decide who is President of the United States. By recognizing and using the states, the current Electoral College system helps to keep our politics more national and inclusive than it would be under a raw popular vote system.

You should do more research, Greg. You obviously don't know Koza the way I do--but it's all online, he's talked about the different things I mention in various web interviews and such. And I hold no grudge against him save that he's wrong--on this and on his support for far, far Left political policies in general.

Should all be fixed. Sorry for the errors and thanks for the catches.

Again, talk to someone who has put together a serious campaign strategy in a single-member district. Candidates in single-member districts, which is what NPV would turn the entire nation into for the purpose of electing the President and Vice President, often pay consultants a great deal of money to figure out whose votes to pursue and who to ignore. That is, even under NPV, candidates will focus in certain geographic areas and on certain kinds of voters. That is the reality that is ignored by NPV's theoretical machinations. Under NPV, candidates would still treat voters and regions inequally. I guess the comfort some people get from NPV is that the inequalities would be harder to predict and perhaps harder to recognize. But the inequalities would also likely produce destabilizing effects, whereas the Electoral College has produced stabilizing effects.

In an NPV race for president, the question is how would the campaigns slice and dice the electorate and the geography? One suspicion that I have is that it's probably easier to drive up your vote in areas where you already have high support, rather than to reach down into areas that are dominated by your opponent. Of course, we also understand that the transaction costs of political organizing generally go down as population density increases (less so in the internet era, but the correlation remains).

The Republican Party of Michigan had no claim to the resources of the McCain campaign. Frankly, they exist to coordinate Republican victories at the state level there regardless of how the national candidates' strategies help or hinder them.

The question of how we elect the "leader of the free world" should not hinge on the experience of a group of Republican partisans in one state in one election. The question is: what system makes justice and liberty more likely? Because some significant measure of political stability is absolutely necessary for liberty and justice, not to mention prosperity, I favor the Electoral College system over and against any national popular vote scheme.

That admits my argument about regional politics. Candidates would have an incentive under NPV to drive up their vote totals in states where they already have 70% support, whereas the Electoral College forces them to those states where they have, say, 45-49% support. The latter system is politically healthier if you care about stability in your political system. And stability is an essential ingredient for both prosperity and liberty.

It's an abuse of statistics to arbitrarily change the denominator. Whether you like NPV or not, it should be easy to recognize that point from their materials as intellectually dishonest spin.

The EC provides an incentive against regional politics, as demonstrated by the 1888 election. Then, Democrats were forced to reach North and Republicans to reach South. Today, Democrats are actively working to put Texas into play, and have had recent success in Colorado and Virginia; Republicans have done and are doing the same in Michigan, Wisconsin, and West Virginia, just to name some off the top of my head.

The Electoral College system as now in place includes powerful incentives that force our political parties to be national and relatively moderate coalitions, shift a significant amount of coalition building to pre-election processes (where it works to make actual individual persons involved in politics less rigidly ideological and more willing to compromise), and focuses elections in their final days on the most politically balanced states (thus providing another moderating impulse while also ensuring greater accountability for the election processes in those, the most hard-fought states that generally have the most narrow election outcomes).