Rudolph Ziehm doesn’t like the Electoral College (“Popular vote bill ‘makes perfect sense to me’,” Jan. 25). That’s his right.

But L.D. 1578 is riddled with technical problems, violates the Maine Constitution’s residency requirements for voter eligibility, is incompatible with ranked choice voting and would undermine Maine’s exceptional method of allocating electoral votes by congressional district.

Ziehm’s account of the Electoral College and southern states fails the population figures of the day. The Electoral College was to satisfy the smallest states: Delaware and Rhode Island, New Hampshire and New Jersey. Only the slave state of Georgia ranks among the five least populated states (1787-1792). And the slave state of Virginia had the highest population of all.

Comments left anonymously are pretty lame, also:

As to the idea that our 45th president was the first to fall short of Alexander Hamilton’s vision, at least one partisan hasn’t been paying very close attention.

Wyoming and Delaware are equally sovereign with California and Texas. That’s the point of equal representation in the U.S. Senate. The Electoral College helps to implement that principle.

Someone suggests that states use an Electoral College model to elect governors, “so their smaller counties will be represented fairly against the bigger counties in their states.” That’s a perfectly good idea, and any state could implement such a model.

Roberta Schlechter, Portland, Oregon, Northwest Region volunteer representative for Michigan-based Keep Our 50 States