It's nearly 2012, and the national horse-race polls that the media adore during primary season will soon recede. Instead it will be time, once more, for colored maps that divide the United States into red states, blue states, and swing states. Only the last category gets much attention, of course. The Washington Post cuttingly titles its own 13 states that matter." Sorry if you live in one of the other, irrelevant 37.

We all know what's to blame for the writing off of most Americans in the presidential election. The fault lies with the electoral college, that relic that means contests are decided state by state. It's ungainly, it's unpopular, it has a dirty, slavery-inflected history, and it's manifestly unfair. But attempts to reform it haven't made much headway since the passage of the 12th amendment two centuries ago. At least until recently.

As a quadrennial reminder, you and I will not be voting for president next November. We vote instead for a slate of electors, known collectively as the electoral college. They, not we, then go on to cast ballots for president and vice-president some time in December. But the actual election is so underpublicized that until 2000 I naively thought that the college was a real meeting, a kind of one-day estates-general in which all the electors fly to Washington and cast their ballots with pomp and circumstance before adjourning to the Dupont Circle Fuddruckers. It's not that fun, I was disappointed to learn. In practice the electors just go to their state capitals to vote, the governors each sign a certificate stating the result, and then Congress counts up the total.

Mostly the electors can be trusted to do what they're told, but sometimes they screw it up. Two elections back, some elector in Minnesota voted for John Edwards for president instead of John Kerry – and he or she didn't even spell his name right, voting for one John Ewards.

And if they're in a really bad mood, the electors can throw the whole thing. It happened in 1836 to Richard Mentor Johnson, our ninth vice-president. Electors in Virginia cast their presidential vote, as expected, for Martin Van Buren, but when it came time to elect his running mate, they all plumped for some other guy. It was enough to deprive Johnson of a majority, and the election had to be resolved by the Senate – which voted to give him the job, three months later than usual.

The constitution, remember, guarantees us the right to vote only for a member of the House of Representatives and, since the early 20th century, for our senators too. (Though there is a truly bonkers proposal, advocated – naturally – by Rick Perry, to repeal the 17th amendment and head back to the bad old days when prospective senators would buy off state officials for a ticket to DC.) But there is no federal right to vote for president or vice-president. The Supreme Court said as much in an 1893 case, and it reiterated the point in a 2000 decision you might have heard of, called Bush v Gore.

The 2000 election, dreadful as it was, did have the silver lining of offering the United States a shotgun civics lesson. George Bush's eventual triumph exposed everything: the pain of winner-take-all allocation of electors in 48 of the 50 states; the hazards of the electoral college, where if three electors with cold feet had voted for Al Gore instead of Bush then he would have won the presidency, Florida recount be damned; but, above all, the injustice of a system wherein the popular vote winner can lose. It hadn't occurred since the 19th century, and we all know what happened next.

Americans did not like the electoral college even before 2000, but they hate it now. Even in a traditional swing state like Florida, where you might think citizens enjoy being carpet-bombed with 30-second attack ads every four years, 78% of voters said in a 2009 poll that the president should be the winner of the most votes in all 50 states. But dumping the thing would take a constitutional amendment, which seems impossible (even though a 1961 amendment to let in the District of Columbia did succeed).

There is, however, another way to let the people and not the electoral college pick the president. It's called the national popular vote interstate compact, and while it once seemed like an anorak's fantasy, it has suddenly picked up steam.

The compact is an elegant end-run around the electoral college – instead of abolishing it, we would render it powerless. It works like this: one by one, each state passes a law whereby its electors must vote for the winner of the presidential poll nationwide, rather than the winner in that state. What's more, the law only comes into force when it has been adopted in states totalling 270 electoral votes: that is, a majority of the college. Once that threshold is crossed, abracadabra! The people elect the president, and the electoral college recedes into an archaic December ritual to formalize the real vote in November.

The national popular vote compact has been kicking around for a bit, but in 2011 it quietly made substantial progress. Eight states and DC have now enacted it, including mighty California with its 55 electoral votes, and the proposal is now halfway to the finish line. A bunch of other states, including New York, are considering it. At this rate, if we are lucky, the coming election could be the last decided in six or seven states rather than 50.

A national popular vote would have made Al Gore president in 2000, and it's no surprise that states that vote blue have been first to adopt the compact. Now that it looks as if abolition of the electoral college could really happen, several Republicans have begun to rail against reform. Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, went on a tear earlier this month, calling the compact "absurd and dangerous" and warning of rampant voter fraud, that favorite Republican bogeyman, before concluding on this blood-chilling note: "We need to kill it in the cradle before it grows up."

You know that prospects are looking good when the Kentucky senator's rhetoric takes a turn for the infanticidal. But there is no in-built Democratic advantage to a national popular vote any more than a Republican advantage to the present system. It's worth remembering that in 2004, we nearly ended up with a mirror image of the previous debacle. Nationally, Bush beat John Kerry by over 3 million votes, or two-and-a-half points. But he only squeaked to a second term by taking Ohio, which he held on to by just 100,000 votes. If McConnell and his friends at the Heritage Foundation are scared to the point of child-murder about a national popular vote, that says more about their perception of the national favor of the Republican party than about the design of the system.

Oh, and the claim that the electoral college ensures attention for smaller states is a canard. A voter in true-blue Rhode Island has as little importance now as one from California. Only swing states count, of whichever size. Large Pennsylvania and tiny New Hampshire get all the attention; if you're in Wyoming, you're a nobody just like me in New York.

That indifference, finally, is the principal reason to adopt a national popular vote for president. Of course we should ensure that the electoral college picks the candidate the country does. But 2000, thank heaven, was a once-a-century outlier.

The true appeal of a national popular vote is to expand presidential elections beyond the swing states and into every part of the country. With a bit more effort, by 2016 we can have a system where the president of our country is elected by citizens all across it. Until then, we will have to watch Barack Obama and his opponent shuttle among Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania while the majority of Americans enjoy no meaningful vote at all.