The Irish proportional representation system has this much in common with the US electoral college system: most of the electorate understand it well enough to use it, but only a few are experts on the finer points of application.in Colorado arebeing offered the chance to back changes that could have a profound effecton a US electoral college system widely seen as badly flawed, writesMary Maher
The difference is that the Irish approve of the way they elect their representatives and the great majority of Americans do not. On November 2nd the citizens of Colorado may trigger the revolution the discontented have been hoping for, and in the process precipitate another post-election legal battle. If the count is as close as predicted, the US Supreme Court could even be forced to step in once again.
Colorado, like 47 other states and the District of Columbia, now allocates all its electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote in the state. Only Maine and Nebraska vary the format, giving two of their electoral votes to the statewide winner and one to the winner of the presidential tally in each congressional district.
In the aftermath of Florida 2000, Democratic interests launched a campaign in Colorado to amend the state constitution by replacing the winner-take-all system with one that divides Colorado's nine electoral college votes in proportion to the popular vote. Colorado usually supports the Republicans, but only by a small margin. Dividing the nine votes proportionally would mean a five-four or at most a six-three split, enough to make the difference in a tight election.
The Republicans have opposed the amendment from the outset and promised to take legal action if it is passed. But even Colorado's governor, Bill Owens, admitted in a recent television interview that the proposal was popular because people believed every vote should count in a democracy. He had no objection himself, he said, if every other state had the same system.
The US Supreme Court could be called into play as the final arbiter if other states decided to challenge a positive vote on the amendment. There's nothing to stop any state from making a federal case on the grounds that candidates have a right to expect a degree of consistency in election procedures.
But most constitutional experts agree that if there is one thing the US constitution is clear on, it is the right of states to determine their own electoral college procedures.
Whatever the outcome, the significance of Colorado's referendum is that it indicates there may be ways to change the electoral college system by sidestepping the US constitution rather than seeking an amendment to it - an almost impossible prospect since it would require a two-thirds vote in both Houses of Congress, plus endorsement by three-quarters of the states.
In the search for a solution by stealth since 2000, several experts in the mathematics of the electoral college system have come into their own. One of them is Dr Robert Bennett, professor of law at Northwestern University in Illinois, who has attracted some attention in the midwest with his radical proposal that middle-ranking states should agree before an election that all their electoral college votes will go, not to the winner of the vote in their state, but to the winner of the popular vote across the nation.
Dr Bennett's argument questions the defence of the present system, which is that it establishes a degree of parity by virtue of the two votes each state receives for its senators regardless of population. Writing in The Green Bag: An Entertaining Journal of Law (2002), he says the sparsely populated states do have more clout than their numbers, just as intended.
But the voters in the densely populated states cast a much weightier vote than anyone else. "By one calculation, those eligible to vote in California (54 electoral votes) had more than 2½ times the formal ability to determine the 2000 presidential election than did those in Montana (three electoral votes.)"
The real losers, he claims, are some 30 states in the middle of the population spectrum that are actually disfavoured mathematically by the present system. Dr Bennett says that Maryland, with 10 electoral votes, has "presidential voting power less than 1.2 times that of Montana voters".
His proposal has some major drawbacks, not least the difficulty of convincing any voters that they should bow to the national majority. But he believes most Americans could be persuaded that it was in their political self-interest to change the system. Presidential campaigns, he argues, now concentrate overwhelmingly on a few "swing states"; large and populous states such as California and New York, with Democratic credentials secured, are largely ignored, as are the states with small populations.
It only takes 11 states to command the 270 electoral college votes to elect a president. "A coalition of 12 to 15 states in the middle of the population spectrum, for instance, could put together a package of electoral votes that would be hard for candidates to resist," Dr Bennett says.
He even offers a precedent. US senators, he points out, were originally selected by their state legislators. In the mid-19th century a number of states, led by Oregon and including his home state of Illinois, took the lead by making de facto moves toward direct elections.
By 1910, 14 of 30 senators elected had been chosen by direct vote. Three years later the 17th Amendment which changed the system was passed. Dr Bennett's long-term aim is to see the same process repeated with the electoral college votes. If just a few states could force the issue, he concludes somewhat wistfully, opposition to popular elections to the presidency might in time "just melt away".
Ironically, hopes that Colorado might lead the way to this happy state are faltering, not so much because the Republicans have opposed the amendment bitterly but because Kerry is doing so well in state polls. With the prospect of securing nine electoral college votes instead of four, Colorado Democrats have recently fallen out with each other on whether their own amendment should be supported
Mary Maher, a former Irish Times journalist, is working as a volunteer in a voter registration drive in Pittsburg