The Supreme Court Is Not Going to Fix the Electoral College

Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard argument on whether the president can break the law with impunity. Today, the high court will consider a smaller issue—whether the electors who choose the president can defy state laws.

Constitutional-law nerds like me are riveted by the case of Colorado Department of State v. Baca—what Erle Stanley Gardner might call the Case of the Errant Elector.

But Jesse Wegman, a member of the New York Times editorial board, told me in an interview this week that it really doesn’t matter: “I don’t think what the Court decides is going to have any impact on how the electoral college works, either for this election or any other election.”

Wegman is worth listening to. Just in time for 2020’s inevitable chaos, he has published . In the book, Wegman provides a clear, compact summary of the distinctly maculate conception of the electoral-vote system, reviews the many ways it has distorted or harmed American government and politics, and dispels the myth that the “college” was some sort of stroke of genius on the part