A member of the General Assembly has sponsored a bill that would change to whom Maryland's 10 electoral votes would be awarded following a presidential election. In the proposed new scenario, the votes would continue to be cast by the state's members of the Electoral College, but instead of going to the winner of the popular vote in Maryland, they would be awarded to the winner of the nationwide popular vote. A number of other states are looking at similar options.

A lot of people believe that the president and vice president of the United States should be elected by the nationwide popular vote, not by an Electoral College system, in which all of a state's electoral votes go to the winner of its own popular vote -- no matter how close.

The trouble is, the Electoral College was established by the U.S. Constitution, and changing that document is notoriously difficult to do, as it should be.

In Maryland, as elsewhere, those interested in changing the current system are avoiding the difficult route of a constitutional amendment to dump the Electoral College. Instead they are looking at changing how their Electoral College representatives vote.

To many, the Electoral College seems like an anti-egalitarian relic from yesteryear that flies in the face of the one person, one vote philosophy that a true democracy is based upon. As opposed to every vote counting equally, we have a system in which it's possible for a relatively small number of voters to hold the fate of the entire election in their hands.

With the current Electoral College system, all of a state's Electoral College votes go to the winner of the popular vote in that state. That works out fairly well a lot of the time, but when a state with a large number of electoral votes, such as Texas or New York, has a very close popular vote, it can distort the one person, one vote concept. A razor thin victory in Texas, say by 10,000 votes, would throw all that state's 32 electoral votes to the winner, while a landslide in New York, perhaps by 1 million votes, would give its 33 electoral votes to the winner. Ten thousand voters in Texas would control 32 electoral votes, while a million voters in New York would control 33.

Another real issue is that voters in smaller states have more Electoral College representation than those in larger states. For example: Wyoming's three EC votes mean it has an "elector" for every 165,000 people; Texas' 32 EC votes translates into an "elector" for every 652,000 people. This is not one-person, one-vote democracy.

That has proven to be the case four times in the nation's history, when the person chosen president by the Electoral College received fewer votes than his opponent -- most recently in 2002, when George Bush became president even though he received a half million fewer popular votes nationwide than Al Gore.

We think it's time to put a more pure form of democracy to work in America. If every state were to adopt the changes that Maryland and others are looking at, the Electoral College vote would become a true reflection of the whole nation's preference for president.

We believe this is an initiative long overdue, and one whose time may finally have come.