Sarah Vowell has it in for Wyoming (and Ohio)

She'll be coming for your state next. First this (which I reported on earlier), now this (NY Times):

I would rather not spend the next Election Day the way I spent the last one: wondering just how much to hate Ohio. My vote was written off because I live in the perpetually sewn-up state of New York. But because the citizens of that battleground state could not make up their gosh darn minds, their votes actually counted. They chose the current president of the United States.

Or rather, to be accurate, last Nov. 2 they chose the rich guys and party hangers-on known as the electors of the Electoral College, and on Dec. 13, those folks elected the president.

But here's the depressing what-if. If neither John Kerry nor George Bush had received the necessary 270 electoral votes to win - which was a real possibility - the House of Representatives would have chosen the president. What's wrong with that? Nothing much - if each state's representatives all voted. But in such a contingency, each state in the union is allotted a single vote for president. Let me repeat that: a single vote. So the half-million residents of Wyoming would have had the same amount of say in electing the president as the 34 million citizens of California.

What is the most pressing social issue in 92-percent-white Wyoming? Whether people should be able to ride snowmobiles in Yellowstone.

(I will go on the record as being against snowmobiles in Yellowstone - not because I'm an environmentalist but because I am not "fun.")

Am I the only New Yorker (or Californian or Texan) who, nearly nine months after Election Day, can still name the specifics of Ohio's concerns to a "Behind the Music" level of detail? That its jobs have gone to China and its schools have gone to hell? That Cleveland is the poorest big city in America?

...

But I cannot live with that equation of Wyoming = California, that one-state-one-vote House contingency. I know it is merely one small procedural rule. It is not as dramatic or as significant as Supreme Court confirmations. It is not as pressing a morass as the war that looks as if it will go on for the rest of all our lives. That is actually why it is a pleasant problem to ponder in the middle of July, years away from the next election. It is solvable.

Let me make one important point of fact before subjecting you to my opinion.

It's not a foregone conclusion that Ohio will decide the presidency in 2008. I can envision scenarios where it is Michigan or Iowa. I think there's even a wild permutation that could make make Colorado or New Mexico come to the forefront. In 2000 it was Florida. In 2004 it was Ohio. In 2008 it could be one of those or something else.

The center of electoral power moves as the voting demographics change. That could be seen as a strength of the system, not a flaw.

Now for my opinion. Electing a president through the popular vote would be impractical and subject to a lot of... well... you know, without a VERY good system of preventing voter fraud. The cost/benefit calculation for those who would mess with the system would shift in favor of evildoing. It's a virtual certainty (by my way of thinking anyway) that both parties would behave in dishonest ways to a greater extent than they do today.

Furthermore, can you imagine a bipartisan commission to explore changes in the way that we vote for a president? If you're imagining it now, please stop. You'll give yourself a headache. Any change would end up being a compromise between what each party sees as being in its short run interest. That can't be good for the long run.

We have a strong history of Federalism in this country. We are, after all, the United States.

The mechanism by which we elect a president reflects the basic principles by which we govern ourselves. To change the former would betray the latter.