As noted previously in this space , the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne just can’t reconcile himself to the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, which in his view put the wrong man in the White House—giving the victory to the candidate with more electoral votes but fewer popular votes nationwide. Today he applauds the Maryland state senate for taking steps to assure that this unspeakably awful outcome doesn’t happen again, by passing a bill that would commit all of Maryland’s electoral votes “to the winner of the nationwide popular vote,” so long as enough other states legislated similarly to total the minimum majority of 270 electoral votes. Frustrated with “the cumbersome process of amending the Constitution,” Dionne wants to use the tools presently available, namely the power of states’ legislatures to choose the method by which their electors are chosen, to produce what he calls a “direct” election of the president.

Funny thing is, Dionne calls the electoral college “antiquated, impractical and dangerous,” yet his own argument proves that it is fresh, adaptable, and responsive to democratic impulses. No amendment is necessary to effect the change he desires, after all. Dionne complains about “subjecting our 21st-century nation to a system invented in the far less democratic 18th century.” (I’ll bet he doesn’t think this about the First Amendment, which can be a pretty big damper on democracy itself.) But our system of choosing presidents works today rather differently from the way it did two centuries ago, and even from the way it was expected to work by its constitutional designers, because they designed so well that the process has been changed to suit evolving circumstances, like the emergence of the two-party system. This latest idea for a change is not unconstitutional; it’s just a bad idea.

And as Dionne’s Post colleague George Will noted last October , California’s Governor Schwarzenegger has already vetoed, in that state, the change that Maryland is now contemplating. Will the country’s largest state ever sign on in future? Maybe. But here’s a fearless prediction: there will never be enough states adopting this idea to bring it to fruition. The first few states to adopt it will find it easy, and largely symbolic. But any state whose additional electoral votes would bring the idea over (or even very close to) the 270-vote threshold will find it a very hard thing to do—too hard, I’m betting. That’s because it amounts to a promise to your state’s voters that no matter whom they want for president, your state’s presidential electors are going to vote the other way if that’s the national trend in the popular vote.

Oh. What was that about this idea being more democratic than what we do now?