To the Editor:

Re “Why Do We Have an Electoral College, Again?,” by Jesse Wegman (Editorial Observer, Jan. 26):

The problem with the Electoral College is not the faithless electors who vote for whomever they please, which is the focus of Mr. Wegman’s piece. Instead, it is that the plurality winner, except in two states (Maine and Nebraska), wins all a state’s electoral votes in presidential elections. If electoral votes were awarded to candidates in proportion to the popular votes they receive in a state, the victories of the Republican candidates in 2000 and 2016, both of whom lost the national popular vote, probably would have been reversed.

We do not need a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College. A federal law that requires the proportional allocation of electoral votes — or laws that replace winner-take-all in all states — would almost always ensure that the electoral-vote winner would also be the popular-vote winner.

Steven J. Brams

New York

The writer is a professor of politics at New York University and author of “The Presidential Election Game” and “Mathematics and Democracy: Designing Better Voting and Fair-Division Procedures.”

To the Editor:

Jesse Wegman notes that “Americans would rightly revolt if a handful of people they’d never heard of ignored their votes and decided the election for themselves.” Because of winner-take-all awarding of Electoral College votes, the sad truth is that even without faithless electors, ballots cast by two-thirds of voters who live in reliably red or blue states don’t matter. Americans should revolt because elections are decided by the minority of voters living in battleground states.