The current situation, with the electoral college selecting the President, and the popular vote selecting the members of the electoral college on a variety of different schemes, varying by state, but mostly under the “winer take all” scheme where the majority winner of the popular vote in the state wins all the electoral votes of the state. The website gives a succinct explanation:

The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee a majority of the Electoral College to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The bill would reform the Electoral College so that the electoral vote in the Electoral College reflects the choice of the nation’s voters for President of the United States. (snip)

The shortcomings of the current system stem from the winner-take-all rule (i.e., awarding all of a states electoral votes to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in each state).

Because of the winner-take-all rule, a candidate can win the Presidency without winning the most popular votes nationwide. This has occurred in 4 of the nations 56 presidential elections. Near-misses have been common. A shift of fewer than 60,000 votes in Ohio in 2004 would have defeated President Bush despite his nationwide lead of 3,500,000 votes.

Another shortcoming of the winner-take-all rule is that presidential candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, or organize in states where they are comfortably ahead or hopelessly behind. In 2008, candidates concentrated over two-thirds of their campaign visits and ad money in just six closely divided “battleground” states. A total of 98% went to just 15 states. In other words, voters in two thirds of the states were essentially spectators to the presidential election.

The U.S. Constitution gives the states exclusive and plenary control over the manner of awarding their electoral votes. The winner-take-all rule is not in the Constitution. It was not the Founders choice and was used by only 3 states in the nations first presidential election in 1789. Maine and Nebraska currently award electoral votes by congressional district a reminder that an amendment to the U.S. Constitution is not required to change the way the President is elected.

The website has several links to analyses of the constitutionality of these legislative efforts at the explanation pages.

Among other problems that supporters want addressed, are:

* Candidates ignore states that either seem strongly for them or against them to concentrate on swing states;

* They want to make sure that every voter, no matter where they live, is reached out to, and

* Every voter has an equal say in the electoral outcome. At this time, voters in low population states such as Montana have much more clout than voters in densely populated states such as New York, for instance, on a per capita basis, because of the rule that each state has at least one representative to the electoral college. The voters’ say is further diluted by most states’ adherence to the “winner take all” rule. States such as Illinois or New York that have high density urban areas that outweigh the large rural areas, for instance, often have strong liberal votes in the urban areas and conservative votes in the rural areas. But the urban areas often have a population density high enough to out-vote the large rural areas of the state. So, the vast swathes of upstate New York and downstate Illinois are outvoted by the urban behemoths of New York City and Chicago, respectively, and because of “winner take all” rules, the conservative rural and suburban voices are drowned out. Only a few states, such as Maine, use different rules, where, in Maine, for instance, each Congressional district elects its own electoral college member.

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Apparently, more categories may be added later, with public input. Notices will appear on the home page. Each request for comments will appear on a single web page. And the contents will be in plain language as much as possible. Editors will create headlines or highlights tied to the current debates and hot topics in the Capitol. The website will be modeled on punchy, successful newspapers such as USA Today. (Update from an e-mail: the upgrade marks the “75th anniversary of the Federal Register Act on July 26, 2010, the National Archives Office of the Federal Register and GPO have launched FR 2.0 on http://www.federalregister.gov. The FR 2.0 web site is a beta site at this time, but it may be approved as an official edition in 2011.” Tip of the OOTJ hat to Janice Anderson at Georgetown Law and to my colleague, Susan Sweetgall at Suffolk U. Law Library in Boston, who alerted me to the story in the Washington Post).

The tip end of the Post article comments that one day, the Register may appear only online. That, of course, has been the dream and pressure both, to reduce costs and make materials more widely available. Librarians and folks at the National Archives and GPO are aware of the problems involved. The requirements to authenticate the materials produced this way, and to archive it and maintain it in a machine-readable format, even as technology moves along, are not being funded. The Congressmen who think this is the way to cut the budget at the Congressional Printing Office need to be educated. How many of them can read documents stored on a five and a half inch floppy disk? Who now can read materials stored in WordStar, formerly one of the most popular word processing softwares? You have to plan to re-copy digital materials periodically, into new physical formats and new, readable software formats. You have to authenticate the copy that you put out, if it is primary law, that this is the true and final copy of the regulations, and that you have put it into a form that cannot be tampered with unless it leaves a signal. These efforts cost some money. I welcome the new developments, and really look forward to the launch. But I am glad the launch does not yet cut off the print version and the depository library program.

The other thing that I worry about as Congress or other governmental bodies imagine they can cut off paper printing and distribution to public libraries of legal materials, is the fact that not ALL citizens have free access to computers or the Internet. When I publish links to articles in the Boston Globe about debates over closing branches of our public libraries here, I have been disheartened by the number of clueless comments from people who say things like “Why do we need libraries? It’s all on the web!” This is so wrong in so many ways! It’s not all on the web. And the very people who lack access to the computers and web are the ones who are hurt the most by closing the public libraries, in so many other ways. In a democracy, I strongly believe that every citizen has a right to have free access to see the laws of the land. It is just WRONG for people to have to pay to get access to statutes, regulations, case law. I don’t mind for companies to charge when they add extra value to these public legal documents –adding headnotes, extra nice indexes, tables, and other plus value aids. But the basic text is something that we already paid for as citizens by paying our taxes. We paid for our legislature to meet. We paid for our courts, and judges to sit. We paid for the Governor and President, and all the various agencies that write the regulations and rules and adjudicate under them. And by golly, those basic documents belong to all of us.

An interesting twist on The Times’s paywall experiment is provided by Michael Wolff at Newser. Wolff declares that

Will [Murdoch's] paywall work is the biggest story in the media business, and it would be quite a journalistic coup to document the progress, or lack thereof, that’s being made in trying to convince a skeptical world to shell out 2 pounds ($3) a week for what’s heretofore been free.

He is not reporting on himself because even less than most news outlets, Murdoch outlets have no objective sense when it comes to their own interests … or willingness to ask questions which the boss might find uncomfortable, or penchant for anything but the party line. The news from News Corp. is always snarlingly good–even when it is very bad.

My sources say that not only is nobody subscribing to the website, but subscribers to the paper itself–who have free access to the site–are not going beyond the registration page. It’s an empty world.

Why would writers want to write for The Times if their work is not going to be read? Some might feel that Murdoch is the “last best hope for getting us paid for our labors” but writers want to be read; as Wolff points out, readers are the “real currency” of writers. Will the paper become irrelevant in a world of free news? The Wall Street Journal is behind a partial paywall and seems to be profitable, but the Journal occupies a very special niche with few real competitors. Can The Times make that claim? What implications does Murdoch’s experiment with The Times have for The New York Times, which plans to erect its paywall in 2011? Murdoch’s goal seems to be to protect the market for the print newspaper, but hasn’t that train already left the station?