And, of course, in the non-sense department there is the Electoral College, which provided a handy civics lesson in 2000 about how little an individual vote really matters in our winner-take-all system. Once you make it past Iowa and New Hampshire, you can win and still lose, as Al Gore did when he carried the popular vote but fewer states overall than his opponent. Opposition to the Electoral College is not new—Jefferson once called it "the most dangerous blot on our Constitution"—and it's one area in which real change is percolating. A new legislative plan in some states that would throw their electoral votes to whoever wins the popular vote would essentially negate it.

That would make perfect sense. So would an overhaul of much of the rest of the system. There could be regional or state primaries that would allow voters to choose as many candidates as they wish. Two or three contenders from each party would prevail and go on to the conventions, which would be real conventions again, not four-day commercials for family values and balloon manufacturers. And finally there would be a president, chosen by voters mailing in their ballots in a timely fashion. The house would be all of a piece. As the playwright Tom Stoppard once wrote, "It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting."

© 2007