Slowly, steadily, this country is moving toward a better, fairer way of electing a president.

Washington is poised to become the fifth state to pass the national popular vote bill, which would guarantee the presidency to the candidate who receives the most votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Oregon ought to be the sixth.

By a bipartisan vote of 39-19, the Oregon House already has approved a national public vote bill. House Bill 2588 is pending in the state Senate.

There are several problems with the current way the country picks its president. But the main issue is the winner-take-all rule in Oregon and other states that awards all of a state's electoral votes to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in each state — not the entire country.

This rule allows a candidate to win the presidency without winning the most popular votes nationwide, something that has occurred in four of the nation's 56 presidential elections, and one in seven of the non-landslide elections. Dr. John Koza, chairman of the national popular vote campaign, notes that a shift of a few thousand votes in one or two states would have elected the second-place candidate in five of the last 12 elections. A shift of 60,000 votes in Ohio alone in 2004 would have defeated George W. Bush despite his nationwide lead over John Kerrey by some 3.5 million votes.

That's disturbing. But there are other, deeper problems with the current system in which states throw all their electoral votes to one candidate or the other, depending solely on the vote in each state. The most glaring is that it drives candidates to spend all their time focusing on, and campaigning in, the handful of evenly divided battleground states where today's presidential elections are won or lost.

States such as Oregon, which is now seen as reliably Democrat, or Oklahoma, where Republicans dominate, seldom if ever see a presidential candidate. There's more than just pride and attention at stake here. When the presidential candidates have no reason to campaign in any of the Pacific Coast states — Barack Obama had locked up California, Oregon and Washington — they also are not compelled to spend any time studying or discussing the issues faced by those states. They also have little or no reason to visit or get engaged in regional issues after the election, either.

Look at what happened before last November's election — and ever since. Ninety-eight percent of the money and candidate visits went to just 15 battleground states. Obama and John McCain made 62 visits to Ohio alone leading up to Election Day. And in Obama's first months in office, where has he made presidential visits? Not Oregon, California or Washington. He's been in battleground states such as Ohio, Michigan and Colorado.

I am under no illusions that under any presidential election system Oregon and its seven electoral votes would be a major player. Even under a national popular vote system, Obama and McCain wouldn't have spent October stumping in Lincoln City or Medford.

But it's likely that the candidates at least would have made one or two swings along the West Coast, stumping for the millions of votes in the Pacific states. A national popular vote would make votes in Oregon and its neighboring states worth fighting for.

Critics of the national popular vote effort frequently claim that it runs counter to the U.S. Constitution. In fact, the Constitution gives states exclusive control over the way they award their electoral votes. There is no winner-take-all rule in the Constitution. Two states, Maine and Nebraska, already award electoral votes by district, just one of the choices that states are allowed to make under the Constitution.

The national popular vote bill will only take effect if and when it is enacted by states that together hold a majority of the electoral votes, 270 of the 538. Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey and Hawaii already have passed bills on the national popular vote.

Oregon, like Washington, should join them this year.