By Laura Brown

Jack Rakove’s pet project is the elimination of the Electoral College.

The Stanford University professor of history and political science told the Morning Forum audience May 15 that “the Electoral College is based on the fiction that a state votes as one entity.”

The Chicago native said that “outside of Cook County, voters in downstate Illinois share the same demographics as neighboring Iowa farmers; the population there is homogeneous, regardless of state lines.”

Rakove said that the framers of the Constitution feared a direct popular election. They believed it could lead to demagoguery in a highly provincial and spread-out country, where there was no way to forge a decisive majority and votes were likely to be scattered among various favorite candidates.

Modern communications and travel have made that argument obsolete, Rakove said.

Rakove, who recently testified before the National Commission on Election Reform - chaired by former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford - said the current method of allocating states’ electoral votes, one for each representative (determined by population) and one for each senator (two per state, regardless of population) gives disproportionate weight to sparsely populated states and violates the principle of “one person, one vote.”

Rakove recounted that Carter, after hearing his argument against the electoral college, said “no way,” noting that such a change would require ratification by a minimum of 37 states and would never be agreed to by those states which currently enjoy an electoral advantage.

The Morning Forum is a members-only lecture series held at the United Methodist Church of Los Altos. Membership is closed for this year. To get on a waiting list for membership, write to: Morning Forum, P.O. Box 274, Los Altos 94023-0274.