Barnett and Kaplan have come up with a system that would replace current winner-takes-all electoral voting with a “weighted vote share (WVS) system,” under which candidates' election showings become the average of their popular vote results in each state and the District of Columbia, weighted in order to reflect the individual state's proportion of total Electoral College votes. California's weight, for example, would be 10.2 percent, which represents its current share of electoral votes.

WVA, Barnett said in an interview, would not only avoid calamities such as that of Florida in 2000, where one candidate got 100 percent of the electoral vote even with lingering doubts about who really won the popular vote. It would also require candidates to pay serious attention to states they now often ignore.