"Going Maine" Won't Fix the Electoral College

Slate's "Swingers" piece on Maine heavily features Maine's unusual electoral quirk: its apportionment of its electoral votes. Maine awards two of its four electoral votes to the statewide popular vote winner, and each of the other two to the winner of each of the two congressional districts.

At the end of the piece, the author discusses proposals to reform the Electoral College by nationalizing the Maine system, and expresses his surprise that such reform would actually push the EC further from the popular vote results:

In any event, some political reformers think we should be taking more of our cues from Maine. Proponents of revamping the Electoral College have suggested that every state adopt Maine's peculiar electoral vote-splitting scheme. At first, I thought this was a brilliant idea. Although vote-splitting sounds bizarre, it actually makes a lot of sense—it's a thoughtful way to ensure that the electoral votes Maine casts more closely reflect the wishes of its people. But then I found this Web site, on which sports statistics guru Jeff Sagarin figured out how the 2000 presidential election would have been decided if all states used the Maine method. Turns out Gore would have been whupped. Ah well. Perhaps there's a better way.

But is this all that surprising? A nationalized Maine system would combine the faults of the Electoral College with the faults of a massively gerrymandered House of Representatives. Perhaps in a country with a not-non-democratic lower house, such a reform would be a positive one, retaining the order-imposing structure of the College while increasing the democratic responsiveness of the system. But as long as the House remains thoroughly gerrymandered, such a reform can only make things worse.