Two hundred years ago, the Founding Fathers made a mistake. They decided that the president of the United States should be elected by a popular vote held among the entire country’s citizens. The results of this flawed system speak for themselves. Under the popular vote, Americans have endured two centuries of elections where the presidential candidate who receives the most votes is also the winner.

This is simply too much democracy. Time and time again, the American people have shown that they can’t be trusted to choose the leader of the free world with such a simplistic electoral method. Then again, Americans would most likely overthrow a system in which they never got to choose their leaders. The only viable alternative is one where the majority only gets to choose its leaders some of the time. In other words, we need an electoral college.

Here’s how it would work: Each state would get a certain number of electors equal to their seats in the House plus their seats in the Senate. That would give each state a minimum of three electoral votes and roughly 535 votes altogether. The District of Columbia would also somehow have three electors, bringing the total to 538 electoral votes. These electors would then gather in Washington one month before inauguration day to vote for the president and vice president. Whoever receives a simple majority of 270 votes would win. This wouldn’t be quite as radical as it sounds. Similar mechanisms exist in other thriving democracies, like the Vatican and the Holy Roman Empire.

Who would choose these electors? State legislatures could decide whether to let the people elect the electors, thereby preserving an element of the old popular-vote system. Or they could save their citizens the time and money of holding a presidential election and simply choose the electors themselves. Leaving both options on the table seems like a good idea. If no candidate receives 270 votes, either because of a 269-269 tie or because the electoral vote fractured across three or more candidates, the House of Representatives will elect the president and the Senate will elect the vice president. This creates the possibility that the elected president and vice president could be political foes, which would be productive.

Such a system would have multiple benefits for our political system. First, it would treat Americans differently according to where they live. The popular vote currently gives every citizen—Californians and Texans, Hawaiians and Mainers, Alabamans and Oregonians—an equal say in choosing the president. An electoral college would solve this problem by giving Americans in some states more influence than Americans in other states. Those benefits would largely be felt by smaller rural states, whose residents deserve to wield disproportionate levels of influence in our political system.