When first envisioned, the Electoral College (EC) was a deliberative body composed of mature and wise men, each representing the interests of the nation and of their state. They had an important job to do. The EC would meet with the candidates and deliberate among themselves regarding which to choose to become the next president. As a final act they would vote (presumably using plurality voting). The winner would become the new President; and the runner-up would become Vice President.
Owing to the difficulty of communications at that time, word of the new President's name would spread very slowly. It would take messengers on foot or on horseback to spread the news. In the early days, the notion of a popular election for president would probably have seemed preposterous, though it does seem an appealing alternative in this modern world with nearly instant world-wide communications.
Circumstances are very different today, but the formal rules stay much the same. Today, the EC
seems largely to serve a formal duty; they still vote, but they do not meet the candidates and they surely do not deliberate.
After the Constitution was ratified, it was soon realized that the top two members of the Executive Branch might often be political opponents who served more to obstruct each other than to support. Amendment 12 was passed as a correction so that the EC would elect the two as a team who ran together.
Plurality voting tends to promote a two-party system, but balanced approval voting (BAV) will instead facilitate the emergence of multiple viable political parties; with more political parties, party affiliation of voters is apt to become more fluid and in turn this should lead to greatly diminished polarization. Plurality voting tends to favor the most extreme candidates in a party; in contrast, BAV is organized to elect a consensus candidate whom the largest possible number of voters can agree on. Using BAV, candidates will find it important to avoid antagonizing voters when possible, even voters who are not supporters. While the top two choices determined in a BAV election may fail to be in the same party, they would tend to be moderates who can find agreement on many issues. If BAV had been used from the beginning, there might have been no need for Amendment 12.
Amendment 12 and Article 2 are the few places where voting is mentioned in the Constitution. It seems clear that the original intent in both Amendment 12 and in Article 2 was that plurality voting should be used in the Electoral College (EC). From a political standpoint this makes it hard to imagine BAV (balanced approval voting) or any alternative system being adopted for EC voting. It follows that we should consider ways to contend with that fact, unfortunate as it may be.
Plurality voting can be depended on to behave satisfactorily only when used for choosing between just two candidates. In consideration of this, it would seem sensible to ask if somehow we could limit the number of candidates presented to the EC to two. With BAV these two candidates would probably not be one Democrat and one Republican, however. If BAV were widely used in the states there would in time be many candidates available from many different parties. But even with many different political parties, by introducing a preliminary nation-wide election, much like a primary, using an appropriate voting system such as BAV to reduce the number of candidates to only two for the EC to consider. States would have to determine how their electors should vote but the decision from the EC would not seem so divisive since with BAV, both candidates would have fairly widespread support and little opposition.
In a more ideal system for presidential elections, I'd hope to see a couple of nation-wide open primaries using BAV. The first of these primaries would only happen when there is an excessive number of candidates and that election would serve to cull the herd down to a more manageable number, perhaps a dozen. Later, the second primary would reduce that number further to perhaps the five or six with the largest net vote-counts. Before, between and following these primaries, there should be some time for voters to become familiar with the remaining candidates before voting in the general election.
The subsequent general election would, using BAV, further reduce the number of candidates to only two. The states would designate their allotted electors and pledge them to vote in the plurality election by the EC for one of the remaining two candidates. States would be free to do this as they choose, but a state's ballots from the general election would be made available to them. The easiest and most natural approaches would start by determining the statewide net-votes for each of the two remaining candidates. Electors might be allocated in rough proportion to the net vote, provided the state is concerned about a democratic outcome, but some states might still opt for a less democratic, winner-take-all approach, giving all their EC votes to their state's favorite between the remaining two candidates.
An alternative scenario would be for an interstate compact modeled on the NPV effort to effectively render the EC moot, a mere formality. In this scenario, enough states would have to adopt BAV and joint the compact for their electors to dominate the decisions of the EC. States using BAV would combine their ballots for a BAV election across those states and the candidate with the larges net vote would become President.
