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It would take a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College completely, and I think the highly populated states would vote against such an amendment, so we may as well try to make it as equitable as possible. Here's my plan...
Instead of a winner-take-all format, could the states all decide to award their EC votes based on percentages? This would make margin of victory more important. I'll give a simple example using some small states. Kerry is definitely not going to win North Dakota. However, if he were to get 33% of the vote there, he could still get one EC vote. Likewise, Bush isn't going to win Rhode Island. However, he could win 1 vote in that state by getting 33% of the vote there. This would provide incentive for candidates to campaign in states where they might not win, but could get close, ex. Kerry's plan to air ads in LA and CO. This plan also protects the influence of highly populated states, because they would still have the most votes to win regardless.
I wouldn't want to see what they do in Maine (awarding some votes based on congressional district wins) applied nationwide, because that would make gerrymandering all the worse.
The only major problem I see here is rounding, and perhaps we could tackle that problem by rounding in the challenger's favor, helping to negate the incumbency advantage.
What do you think?
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