Arnold indeed veto the CA bill that would have attempted to undermine the electoral college. George Will's column of October 12 has the details. Will also provides a good summary of the pro-electoral college arguments. He has a good point about the 2000 election; the electoral college system restricted the recount dispute to a single state. A national election would have led to a marge larger recount problem. Will could have gone even further: If only a few states had decided that their electoral college vote would go to the national winner instead of the state winner, how would they deal with a situation in which the national totals were contested?
I'm less convinced by Will's rejection of the argument that the electoral college system makes non-battleground states irrelevant. According to Will, this argument is only about the lack of voter interest in safe state, and the fact that presidential campaigns spend less attention to safe states. I believe the debate is about more: If a state is safely in one partisan camp, the president may be tempted to neglect the state also between campaigns (if there is such a thing in today's world of permanent campaigns). Safe states may be disconnected from the majoritarian control mechanism. You don't want the president to do what is good for Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, etc. and neglect the other states. Will argues that scrapping the electoral college would induce parties to rely on narrow localized majorities. Florida, Ohio, and other battleground states do not constitute a contiguous localized part of the country, but at least in 2004 they did not constitute even a majority of the electoral college votes (for a nice picture, look here). (I leave the rather easy counter-argument to that claim to the putative reader...)
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