Across the American West, fire wardens create firebreaks—vegetation-free swaths gouged through forests and fields to slow and limit the spread of wildfires. In U.S. presidential elections, the Electoral College serves the same purpose—limiting the spread of one state’s malfeasance, manipulation, ineptitude, and/or operational failure to other states. For all the trauma and bitterness that emerged from Florida in 2000, the catastrophe was limited to one state.
For years, a choir of voices has demanded that we eliminate the Electoral College and elect presidents via national popular vote (NPV)—an idea that is appealing in theory, but treacherous in execution. NPV is the electoral equivalent of filling firebreaks with pampas grass, scrub oaks, dead brush, bails of hay, and discarded chemicals. Eliminating the Electoral College could turn virtually every presidential election, every four years, into a 50-state Florida-2000-style conflagration—with a partisan arms race of electoral machinations in the years between elections.
If they ever developed a similar system in Canada it would be rigged to limit Saskatchewan’s influence.
Which only goes to show that Canada was set up to make life easier for the wealthy and influential. Winner takes all, no constitutional restrictions, simple majority rules.
The only thing we have left still (maybe) working for us is paper ballots.