On Monday, the Electoral College elected Donald Trump president despite the fact that Hillary Clinton racked up a 2.8 million-vote lead in the popular vote. It's an outcome that's provoked outrage and renewed calls for the direct election of the president.

Proponents argue that this would not only be more democratic, but would also compel candidates to compete for votes throughout the country, instead of focusing on a small number of persuadable voters in a handful of swing states.

Whatever the merits of these arguments, abolishing the Electoral College would require a constitutional amendment, and that's a political nonstarter in the current political climate. Republicans simply will not go along with dismantling a system that gives disproportionate power to the sparsely populated states where they hold sway — in the Electoral College, a single Wyoming resident is the equal of four California residents.

An alternative, the National Popular Vote, would also award the presidency to the candidate with the most votes, and it doesn't require a constitutional amendment. Instead, individual states pass laws that award their electors to the winner of the national vote; these laws will take effect when states with over half the electors have enacted similar legislation.

So far, 10 states and the District of Columbia, with a total of 165 electoral votes, have adopted popular vote legislation.

But at a certain point, the National Popular Vote runs up against the same partisan divide as constitutional reform. All the states that have passed popular vote laws are reliably blue, and with Republicans in control of most of the other state legislatures, it's difficult to see how enough other states will enact laws that effectively nullify the Electoral College.

So is there any way to make presidential elections more accurately represent the will of the people? Perhaps.

Ranked choice voting, or instant runoff voting, could radically alter the outcome of our elections and perhaps encourage millions, or tens of millions, of eligible voters to participate in a process they now shun. It's a system already in use in India, Ireland and Australia, as well as several American municipalities. On Nov. 8, Maine became the first state to adopt ranked choice voting for statewide and congressional races.

Ranked choice voting permits voters to assign an order of preference to the various candidates running for office. When the ballots are counted, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and those votes are reallocated to the candidate who was the second choice of the voters. This process of reassigning votes is repeated until one candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote.

Ranked choice voting empowers the electorate and reduces the dominance of the two major political parties, because independent and third party candidates no longer function as spoilers.

For example, in the last election, voters who supported the progressive platform of Green Party candidate Jill Stein could have voted for her as their first choice and selected Clinton as their second choice. It would have prevented Stein voters from tipping the election to Trump, as happened this year in both Wisconsin and Michigan.

Also, a well-funded independent campaign by someone like Bernie Sanders or any one of a number of Republicans could conceivably have been competitive with either or both of the deeply unpopular official party nominees.

And finally, consider this: Had ranked choice voting had been used in the crowded Republican primaries, it might well have produced a very different result.

After all, Trump may have been the first choice of a plurality of voters, but he wasn't the first choice of the majority — and he was practically no one's second choice.

Bruce Ferguson is a member of the Callicoon Democratic Committee in Sullivan County.