In this file photo from April 17, 2016, people visit the south lawn of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Estelle Doro)

Topeka ? In about three weeks, six people chosen by the Kansas Republican Party will gather in the Old Supreme Court room of the Statehouse and cast their votes, on behalf of the entire state, for Donald Trump to be the next President of the United States.

Trump won the popular vote in Kansas, 57-36 percent, a margin of nearly a quarter-million votes, and he won majorities in all but two of the state’s 105 counties.

But that wasn’t the case nationwide where Trump lost the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton by more than 2.5 million votes, or nearly 2 percent of all votes cast, according to unofficial estimates. But in the Electoral College, Trump emerged with a near-landslide victory, 306-232.

Although there have been other cases in which the electoral vote winner failed to win the popular vote, most recently in the Bush-vs.-Gore election of 2000, the 2016 race is being called the most lopsided reversal of the popular vote in U.S. history, and it has renewed calls, mainly from Democrats and others on the left, to abolish the system that dates back to the 18th century.

Among those calling for its end are former Vice President Al Gore, who lost that 2000 race despite winning the popular vote, California Sen. Barbara Boxer, a Democrat, and New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio, an independent who supported Clinton in the 2016 race.

“Not going to happen,” said University of Kansas political science professor Burdett Loomis, who has written extensively about the Electoral College and has been calling for years to abolish it.

Winner-take-all system

In a book to be released next year, Loomis contributed a chapter on the Electoral College and argues that one of its basic flaws is the “winner-take-all” system that has been adopted in all but two states, Nebraska and Maine.

When the Constitution was written in the late 1700s, Loomis argues, it was considered impractical for a candidate to campaign nationwide or to get information out to all voters because the modes of transportation and communication were too slow.

“To be sure, some delegates to the Constitutional Convention rejected the idea of direct election because they feared placing too much power in citizens’ hands,” he wrote. “More of the framers, however, found direct election impractical because of the difficulties of communicating effectively and knowledgeably across the entire nation.”

The idea at the time, he wrote, was that voters would elect the “electors,” presumably educated and respected members of the local communities who, “would exercise judgment in voting for candidates.”

What they failed to anticipate, he argues, was the rise of political parties, which would come to dominate the political process at both the state and national levels.

“By 1836 the role of the Electoral College had become well defined,” he wrote. “Voters selected electors pledged to candidates who ran for president under party labels. In large part because each state adopted a ‘winner-take-all’ rule for presidential (and most other) elections, only two major parties emerged.”

That helps explain what happened in 2016, although Loomis argues that it’s not necessarily the Electoral College system’s biggest problem.

Under “winner-take-all,” no matter how large a candidate’s margin of victory is in a state — whether it’s a single vote or 4 million votes — the winner gets all of that state’s electoral votes.

In the 2016 election, Clinton won a number of states by very wide margins, but lost in similar-size states by very narrow margins.

In California, for example, Clinton won by nearly a 2-to-1 margin, 62-32 percent, a difference of 4 million votes. That gave her 55 electoral votes. But the size of that margin added nothing to her electoral count because she would have gotten those 55 electoral votes even if she’d won the state by just a single popular vote.

Another example can be found in the states of New York and Florida, each of which has 29 electoral votes. In New York, Clinton won by a margin of 1.5 million votes. But in Florida, she lost by a mere 113,000 votes.

Combining the results of those two states, Clinton received 54 percent of the total, while Trump received 46 percent, a margin of nearly 1.4 million ballots. But because of the winner-take-all system, their electoral votes were divided evenly.

One person, many votes

Another factor in the Electoral College, Loomis wrote, is the way votes are allocated among the states, with each state’s Electoral College the same size as its congressional delegation.

That gives small states like Wyoming, Alaska and even Kansas a “senate bonus” because they get two additional electoral votes, regardless of their population.

That gives Wyoming, with the smallest population of only 586,107 people three electoral votes, or one for every 195,369 people. By contrast, California, with a population of 39.1 million people, gets 55 electoral votes. That’s one for every 711,725 people.

That means when popular votes are translated into electoral votes, a single voter in Wyoming has more than 3.5 times the impact in the Electoral College as a single voter in California.

Put another way, if California got the same number of electoral votes per-person as Wyoming gets, it would have 200 electoral votes instead of 55.

In Kansas, which has six electoral votes, the ratio is one per 485,274 population. That means each vote in Kansas has about 1.5 times the electoral power as each vote in California, but less than half the power of a vote in Wyoming.

Why it won’t change

Loomis and others say the system is unlikely to change because in order to do so, relatively small states like Wyoming and Kansas would have to agree to give up some of the out-sized power they now enjoy.

And many of those smaller states are dominated by the Republican Party which came out the winner in both 2000 and 2016 when the minority candidate won the majority of electoral votes.

“Right now, it clearly advantages Republicans – two minority popular vote presidents in the last five elections – and the vast sweep of red across the country, state by state, argues against such a change,” Loomis said. “Moreover, politicians in many states think that the Electoral College benefits them and their states.”

But Loomis said the disproportionate power that small states get is only one obstacle. Another is the disproportionate power held by the small handful of competitive “swing states” like Florida, Ohio and North Carolina that can tip the balance in an otherwise evenly divided election.

The U.S. Constitution provides two ways of approving amendments, but the only one that has ever been used is for Congress to pass a measure with two-thirds majorities in both chambers, followed by ratification by three-fourths of the states, or 38 of the 50.

Short of a constitutional amendment, another option that has been widely discussed is the National Popular Vote interstate compact.

That would replace the winner-take-all system in most states with an agreement among states in the compact to cast all of their electoral votes for the candidate who wins the national popular vote, regardless of who wins in their particular state.

The legislation states that it would not take effect until it has been adopted by states having at least 270 combined electoral votes, the minimum needed to win a presidential election.

So far, it’s been adpted by 10 states and the District of Columbia, which have a combined 165 electoral votes. But it has never been considered in Kansas, and Loomis said he thinks it’s a bad, and possibly unconstitutional idea.

“I know the NPV supporters have argued that their scheme does pass constitutional muster, but in a close election, in which, say, several Republican states were forced to have their electors cast votes for a narrowly elected Democratic candidate, who ordinarily might not have won the electoral vote contest, the possibility of disruption and many faithless electors is far too dangerous to risk,” he said.

“I’m not crazy about the Electoral College and think that some kind of popular vote election would be preferable, but the NPV is for me a bridge too far,” he said.