No sooner did the 2008 election hove into view than legislators in Albany broke out in fantods over the Electoral College. Five Republican assemblymen have proposed a bill that would eviscerate the Founders’ intent in respect of the College by automatically directing Empire State electors to throw their support behind whichever candidate achieves a plurality of the national popular vote. The names of these five assemblymen are Fred Thiele, Andrew Raia, Jim Bacalles, Joseph Errigo, and Teresa Sayward. These geniuses reckon that if Mr. Blue, say, wins a plurality of the national popular vote against, say, Mr. Green and Mr. Red, New York’s electors should all have to cast their vote for Mr. Blue, even if 100% of the voters in New York State want Mr. Red.

Ridiculous? No doubt. But if the bill passes, New York would become part of a movement, hatched by a computer science professor in California, to wreck what has proven to be one of the most successful institutions in American constitutional history. It’s an institution to which most Americans paid scant attention until 2000, when President Bush’s narrow victory in Florida, a win confirmed only after weeks of contentious recounting, propelled him into the White House despite a loss in the nationwide popular vote. The left has sought to portray this as an affront to America’s founding principles. A look at the records from the Constitutional Convention finds the Founders mulling many methods for electing the executive, including direct popular election, and rejecting all the other possibilities, including direct popular election, in favor of an Electoral College designed to serve as a kind of universal joint to American federalism.

Our founders worried that direct elections would encourage partisans to use violence to intimidate voters and that it would favor citizens of the most populous states.They worried that election by the national legislature would lead to “cabal or corruption.” Selection by state governors would be too beholden to interstate and intrastate intrigues. Although hardly any of the Founders were entirely happy with the College, they concluded it was the only way to minimize the dangers they perceived, in that its structure would reduce partisan machinations and corruption, as well as mitigating the influence of bigger states compared to smaller ones.The Founders also comprehended that to achieve those goals they were sacrificing the voters’ ability to influence elections directly. It was a trade-off they thought was worth making.

Time and experience, both at home and abroad, have proven them right. Within the past decade, America’s electoral college has saved us from what would have been an interminable and contentious national recount by confining the 2000 controversy to one chad-addled state.Last month’s presidential vote in Mexico, conducted via direct popular election, is still unsettled as a razor-thin margin has encouraged the loser to push for street protests and yet another recount.The push for Electoral College “reform” of which some lawmakers hope New York will become a part is an example of precisely the size-ism the Founders feared, as a handful of large states like New York try to throw their weight around to diminish the influence of small states.

The truth is that it’s not so much the Electoral College that diminishes New York’s presidential significance compared to other “battleground” states as the fact that the state is so “blue” that Democrats can safely assume they will accrue New York’s electoral votes without having to work too hard for them, while Republicans feel their votes don’t count. The solution for Republicans is not to tinker with the system but to win on the issues, i.e., to enter the battle of ideas and start persuading presidential candidates that the state is in play. Not only would that force candidates to pay more attention to the state, but it would also mean New Yorkers were doing their fair share to keep candidates from both parties honest. That would be the most meaningful electoral reform of all.