Judith Best, a political scientist from the State University of New York at Cortland, told her colleagues that the electoral vote system forces candidates to appeal to more than one or two regions, or to one political ideology.

“A president who wins the office by running up huge margins of 80 percent to 20 percent on the Eastern seaboard and the Midwest, and loses by similar margins in the South and the West, is not a president who can govern,” she said.

If the United States had used a nationwide popular vote method of choosing the president in 2000, “it would have created 50 Floridas,” said Best.