Get set for a new campaign to scrap the electoral college and institute election of the president by popular vote. That’s the forecast on the eve of presidential election. The latest report is out this week from The Hill newspaper, which covers the Congress. It follows a dispatch by the editor of the Sun, writing in the American Spectator, which picked up on the call by Vice President Emeritus Albert Gore to end the electoral college. This pot is being stirred owing to the possibility that Governor Romney will win the popular vote this year while President Obama squeaks through on a vote in the meeting of electors who are sent by voters in each state.

These columns last wrote about this idea in June 2010 in an editorial called “Palin’s Path To Power.” It was shortly after the senate in Albany voted to join something called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. This would be an end run around the constitutional system of each state sending electors to vote for the president in a body that is now called the “electoral college,” a phrase that was introduced not in the Constitution but in legislation in the 19th century. Under the national popular vote scheme, the electoral college would still exist — but states would agree that their electors would vote for whoever won the popular vote nationally.

We were a bit startled back then to see the New York State senate sign onto this scheme. After all, in 2004, the state voted for Senator Kerry for president and Senator Edwards for vice president by a margin of something like 1.4 million votes. That was just the margin. If New York had by then approved the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, it would have been bound to cast its vote in the Electoral College for George W. Bush and Vice President Cheney, who won the national popular vote. That didn’t happen because the state Assembly hasn’t approved the popular vote interstate compact.

Nor have enough other states. Only eight have adopted it so far. And it won’t go into effect until it has been ratified by enough states to account for 270 electoral votes, the same number that is needed to elect a president. All the states that approved it so far are states that have been voting Democratic in the presidential election. But one of the difficult issues in respect of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is that it’s not entirely a left-right issue. Some prominent conservatives favor the idea, including Senator Fred Thompson, who used to represent the Volunteer State in the upper house.

There aren’t many conservatives who like the idea, though; we ourselves are for hewing to the current system owing to our constitutional cussedness. National Popular Vote’s most engaging advocate is the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg, whose most recent post points out, among other things, that the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is opposed in the Republican Party’s national platform for 2012. In any event, it’s going to be a superstorm of irony if Mr. Obama wins the election in the electoral college after losing the national popular vote. When the obverse happened, the Hill reminds us, Senator Clinton called for the end of the electoral college. Senator Schumer called it “antediluvian.” Senator Durbin called it a “dinosaur.”