The US Presidential election uses an "electoral college" system, where each state gets a certain number of "electors" (votes), and those electors cast the official votes for President. Each state's law determines how those electors are selected, and which candidate they vote for.
Some states are "proportional", giving a candidate a percentage of electoral votes based upon their percentage of the popular vote. Some states are "winner take all", giving all electoral college votes in that state to the candidate that wins the most popular votes from that state.
1. A True Proportional Allocation of Electoral Votes
Scenario: Electoral votes are apportioned according to the popular vote, with the winner getting the "round up." e.g. A state with 10 electoral votes splits 53% - 47%. The winner gets 6, the loser gets 4. (Alternatively, you could go 5-5, but this makes it even worse!)
Colorado came the closest to doing this back in 2004, but abandoned it for a pretty good reason, going to proportional representation in electoral college votes almost guarantees that your state will be ignored.
2. Congressional District Apportionment
Scenario: Winner of each Congressional District gets 1 electoral vote, and the winner of the state gets the remaining two electoral votes e.g. Maine & Nebraska. In practice, neither Maine nor Nebraska saw a lot of activity during the 2012 campaign.
The point here is pretty simple, going to a proportional system guarantees that your state is either no longer in play or not really worth the effort. Because of this, going to such a system simply reduces the impact of a state in an election, and is therefore not in the interest of the state to do.
A possible better way, that could make all states competitive, is to give the candidate with 50% plus 1 all the votes, otherwise use either version of propositional / congressional allocation.
NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker
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