Stanford computer science professor John Koza has proposed the most original, bold, yet practical political reform I've heard in ages. He has devised a way to elect the president by popular vote, instead of by the Electoral College, without the politically impossible task of amending the U.S. Constitution. The change would eliminate the profoundly anti-democratic chance that a president can win office with fewer votes than his opponent, which has happened four times in U.S. history.

Here's how the reform would work:

The U.S. Constitution gives each state a certain number of electoral votes for president. Each state has the right under the Constitution to choose how it casts those electoral votes. The current winner-take-all system, used in all but two states, is not required by the Constitution. Nebraska and Maine use vote totals by congressional district to award some of their votes.

Professor Koza points out that states can enter a binding compact with other states, agreeing to give their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the nationwide popular vote. The compact would not take effect until it was joined by states that have a majority in the electoral college (That might be a handful of big states or a slew of smaller states.) As an interstate compact, a tool commonly used by states for many different purposes, it would be binding and enforceable in court.

This change would be good for Alaska -- and for any other state whose preference in the presidential race is not in doubt. Right now, candidates spend almost all their time and money in states that are up for grabs, the "battleground" states. Voters in other states, and their concerns, are safely ignored.

But if you free candidates from the state-by-state calculus of the Electoral College, they would campaign anywhere they can motivate large numbers of voters. Every vote, regardless of the state where the voter lives, would have equal power to put a candidate over the top.

Switching to the popular vote would also make it harder to steal a presidential election. As the nation saw in Florida in 2000 and Illinois in 1960, a local effort to twist the vote count can determine the outcome of a national election.

This isn't some hare-brained theoretical idea that will never take root outside the ivy-coated walls of academia. California's legislature recently passed the necessary measure, but Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed it.

The Electoral College is an anachronism that has more than outlived whatever usefulness it had. If democracy means anything, it means that the person with the most votes in an election ought to win.