Wouldn’t it be better for states to allocate electoral votes by proportional allocation or congressional district?
States adopted the winner-take-all unit rule primarily due to partisan incentives – their leaders did not want other states to gain an advantage for their favored candidates. Unlike NPV, which creates a level playing field, changing a state’s rules for allocating electoral votes nearly always is suspect from a partisan perspective. Such “reform” efforts are typically led by those whose party would secure a national advantage if that particular state were to divide its electoral votes rather than award all of them to the statewide popular vote winner. As FairVote demonstrated in its report Fuzzy Math: Wrong Way Reforms for Allocating Electoral College Votes, allocating votes by congressional district and proportional allocation both result in far less fair presidential elections than election of the president by a national popular vote. Under allocation by congressional district, fewer than one in ten congressional districts would be close enough to be truly contested by the campaigns.
