Professor Robert Bennett wants to reform the electoral system to make sure the problems of the 2000 presidential election do not happen again.

Bennett said he came up with the idea just after the infamous election, when former Vice President Al Gore received 500,000 more votes than President Bush but still lost in the Electoral College.

His proposal would ask a certain number of states to award their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote, regardless of how the residents of those states cast their ballots. The winner who receives the most votes nationwide would therefore end up with a 100-vote cushion in the Electoral College.

Bennett, the Nathaniel L. Nathanson professor at the NU School of Law, presented his proposal at a 2001 conference.

Since then, Stanford University Press agreed to publish a book, “Taming the Electoral College,” authored by Bennett and four others, which discusses the idea in detail.

Bennett said the book will be available April 21.

“(With this new system) the nationwide popular winner would in all likelihood be the winner of the Electoral College,” he said. “It would make it much less likely that the winner of the popular vote would not become president.”

Bennett said his plan would require the cooperation of states on both sides of the political spectrum to work effectively.

“I would not compel anybody,” he said. “The only hope would be a cooperative measure.”

Bennett also said this plan would not require an amendment to the Constitution, as individual states determine whether or not electors must vote for that state’s popular winner.

The plan would be easier politically than scrapping the Electoral College, he said, and would decrease the chances of a court challenge.

“A large number of states, rightly or wrongly, would think a nationwide popular winner would be in opposition to their own interests,” Bennett said. “Any variation of this proposal would require fewer states than a Constitutional amendment.”

A bipartisan group of former congressmen, the Campaign for the National Popular Vote, has embraced a similar idea.

The group announced a proposal to have states with a total of at least 270 votes, a majority in the Electoral College, give their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote. The group includes former Sen. Birch Bayh (D-Ind.) and former Rep. John Anderson (R-Ill.).

But the plan is unrealistic, said Kenneth Janda, professor emeritus of journalism and political science.

“I can’t imagine any state buying into that,” he said.

The current system helps avoid drawn-out elections, he said.

“The Electoral College is the best insurance we have against a national recount,” Janda said.

Janda pointed to the election of 1960, when John F. Kennedy won by a slight margin over Richard Nixon.

Nixon did not ask for a recount because he knew he would have to win three states in the recount that Kennedy had won according to the original results.

A similar scenario also played out in the 1968 race between Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, Janda said.

The Electoral College provides our nation with a clear winner in a short time, Janda said.

“Our nation cannot take months and months of recounts for presidential elections,” he said.

“The Electoral College helps us avoid the greatest evil: no clear winner in a nationwide election.”

Reach Ketul Patel at [email protected].