Defining absurdity.

Note: Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell has declined to support his party's new electoral vote bill. My overall point still stands.

Until the 1830s, the British House of Commons drew its members from districts drawn centuries earlier. Given natural population shifts, migration, industrialization, and the like, until they finally got around to fixing it in 1832, the boundaries were so antiquated that some abandoned villages were sending 2 MPs to London, while industrial hubs like Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, and Bradford were left completely unrepresented. The most odious of these districts were the infamous "rotten boroughs" and "pocket boroughs," where the voting population was either small enough to be bribed, or only consisted of a single landholder who was assured election. The overall effect of this system was that aristocrats and rural Tory landowners were able to hold an inordinate amount of power, and edge out middle-class urban liberals.

The U.S. today isn't nearly that bad. But in some ways we're getting there.

Virginia Republicans are putting forward a new bill that would grant electoral votes based on congressional districts rather than overall popular vote. Maine and Nebraska already do this, but Virginia goes even further by granting the 2 additional votes (the ones representing senators) to the winner of the congressional district count rather than the winner of the whole state. Similar bills are being pushed in other Republican-controlled swing states, though they stick to the Maine/Nebraska model.

If every state had the Maine/Nebraska rules in November, Mitt Romney would have beaten Barack Obama 273 to 262, despite Obama's 4-point popular vote victory.

Granted, this assumes every state would have had them in place, which is unlikely to happen, and if every state did, it would have allowed Obama to shave some votes off of some Republican states too. But it's clear that the net advantage would have been Republican, despite Obama's comfortable popular vote victory.

Ultimately, the source of the problem comes from the current congressional district lines, which in many key states are gerrymandered to the point of silliness. Thanks to state-level GOP victories in 2010, Republicans redrew already-conservative district lines to give them a staunch advantage. These proved highly effective in November:

• In Pennsylvania, Obama won by 5 points, and Democratic Sen. Bob Casey won by more than 9. But Democrats only won 5 of the 18 House seats.

• In Florida, Obama won by a razor-thin 1 point, though Sen. Bill Nelson won handily with an 11-point lead. Still, Democrats only picked up 10 of 27 House seats.

• In Ohio, Obama won by 3 points, and Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown by 6. Democrats only won 4 of 16 House seats.

• In Michigan, Obama won by nearly 10 points, and Sen. Debbie Stabenow by 16. Democrats only won 5 out of 14 House seats.

Nationwide, even though nearly 1.4 million more voters picked Democratic candidates over Republican ones, the GOP maintained a respectable House majority of 234 seats to the Democrats' 201. It's not at all hard to understand why the Republicans would want to base the presidential election on this sort of system.

I'd be lying if I said I don't care that the Republicans are the ones doing this, because that's probably a great deal of what is bugging me. But even that aside, is this not a little absurd? If we are going to pride ourselves on being the beacon of democracy, should our government not adhere to some basic democratic and majoritarian principles?

The thing is, these bills are perfectly constitutional. States have the right to pick their electors however they choose (Democratic-Republicans and Federalists actually tried to use this to their advantage in the 1800 election). And aside from some basic civil rights provisions, states more or less have the right to apportion their congressional districts however they choose.

The Founders probably thought the Electoral College was a good idea. But they also thought all sorts of things were good ideas that we now think are crazy (it was 1787, after all). It's instances like these that increasingly show how silly our electoral systems are, and how we need to seriously look at changing them. The very fact that the Republicans feel the need to alter the electoral vote in their favor should say something about the system; the very real possibility that Romney could have won the popular vote without winning the electoral vote should be reason enough to get rid of the thing altogether.

We're a long way from returning to the age of the rotten borough. But as long as states can gerrymander their districts to so blatantly favor particular parties, and as long as the Electoral College even allows the possibility of such grossly unrepresentative elections, we're skewing our democracy and our political dialogue in the same direction. I've been to Ohio and Florida; they're both very nice places. But they aren't any more American than Minnesota, Idaho, Oregon, Tennessee, or any of the other 40ish non-swing states. Nor are rural conservative Rust Belt voters more entitled to a piece of the congressional pie than urban and suburban voters.

One of the tritest political jokes is how obsessively candidates invoke small towns, visit diners, pretend to like hunting, etc. But it's not that far from the truth: our electoral system grossly favors rural areas over urban ones, small states over big ones, and ultimately a few key swing states over most other states. I can understand rural voters not wanting to be edged out of the political process. But that doesn't mean they get such an outsized share of it.

We need to scrap the Electoral College, and we need to have nonpartisan redistricting. These should be two pretty easy fixes. But as long as we stay content to have a system that lets politicians fix things the other way, our elections will continue to define absurdity.

With centrists like these...

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz made another one of his periodic forays into the political realm the other day at a National Retail Federation convention.

Schultz lambasted Congress for its "lack of leadership" in combating fiscal problems, and called on business leaders to exercise their influence and convince everyone to come together, compromise, be more bipartisan, show more leadership, work across the aisle, and fix the "dysfunction of Washington, D.C."

Those might not have been the exact words he used, but it doesn't particularly matter, as his exact words appear to be the same bland flavor of "centrist" mush of which we've seen a lot over the last few years.

Congress is dysfunctional and partisan. Basically everyone agrees on that. And the rhetoric used by these partisans is too often empty, buzz-worded, and sound-bite-ready, focused more on saying the right things than actually providing functional proposals.

But as Mr. Schultz so finely illustrates, that's not at all exclusive to the right and left. What we often miss is how equally vacuous the rhetoric used by our self-proclaimed centrists is.

Schultz isn't giving us any solutions. Despite how dire he sees our fiscal outlook, the most specific Schultz will get is this vague exhortation for business leaders to exercise "influence" to convince Congress to make a budget deal.

We see this far too often (look no further than the comically unsuccessful Unity '08, No Labels, and Americans Elect campaigns). What passes for a centrist movement these days needs no ideology, no defined goals, no specific platform. Only the requisite hand-wringing about the lack of Civility, wistful outcries for Real Leadership in Washington, the essential avowal that Both Sides Are to Blame, and just wishing that those gosh-darn politicians will be nice to each other and compromise.

I'm not talking about the oft-maligned false equivalency; that's another argument entirely. I usually align with the Democrats, but I recognize the need for a real centrist movement, as well as more bipartisan cooperation. What I fail to see is how this sort of vagueness is all that helpful.

I have respect for centrists and independents. Genuine ones. I don't always agree with Michael Bloomberg, but to his credit, he generally avoids drivel like this. His mayorship has allowed him to implement real, tangible ideas for solving educational problems, gun violence, and public health issues. Ross Perot got 19% of the vote in 1992 not because he had the rosiest stories about civility, but because he went around with his easels and charts and offered specific solutions to the nation's problems.

Howard Schultz is right that Washington needs leadership. But if he wants to have the sort of real impact on politics that he seems to want, he could offer some of that leadership too. Give us a tax proposal. Tell us what budget cuts he would make. Give some thoughts as to what "compromise" actually looks like.

Otherwise, he's really just part of the problem.