While he backs the compact, in a keynote speech Lawrence Lessig, the Roy. L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, outlined a new proposal for a constitutional amendment he suggested could garner broader support.

The proposal would award the support of each state’s electors to the top two candidates on a “fractional proportional” basis, meaning they would receive votes equal to their percentage of the overall state results.It also includes a provision aimed at lessening what some critics consider the unfair advantage small states enjoy in the allotment of electoral votes.

“If we had fractional proportional allocation by states, the swing-state problem disappears,” Lessig said. “Presidential candidates would … at least try to campaign to everyone throughout the whole country.”

During the National Popular Vote panel, moderated by Richard Hasen, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law, Richie cited some of the flaws he sees with the Electoral College system.

More than two-thirds of the states have not seen “a major-party nominee for president or vice president campaign in a rally [there] trying to get votes in the general election in the last three months of a campaign since 2000,” he said, “nor has there been a single campaign television ad … targeted to any of their voters for almost 20 years — and it’s not going to happen next year.”

Reed Hundt, chairman and CEO of Making Every Vote Count, said the current system “has excluded most Americans from full participation in the choice of a president. It has skewed the parties’ policies and popular bases in ways that have exacerbated social divisions [and is] racist and sexist in its effects.”

The compact “would force the parties to compete everywhere for every vote,” added Hundt, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

But Muller said that the sum of vote tallies of all states does not constitute a “single popular vote” because of the varied rules on voter identification, early voting, and voter eligibility. Making the system consistent nationally would require a constitutional amendment.

Amel Ahmed, associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, also opposes the compact, but for different reasons.

“I might be one of the last remaining people on the left who is still defending the Electoral College or at least saying, ‘Not so fast,’” she said.

Ahmed said problems attributed to the system actually reflect the weakening of the two major parties, which itself stems from the increasingly narrow coalitions they pursue. The compact is “really a technical solution to what’s fundamentally a political problem,” she said, warning that adopting a national popular vote would exacerbate that party weakness.

Calling democracy “an agreement to play a game according to a certain set of rules,” Ahmed also called the compact “an attempt to change the rules without changing the agreement.”

“This is kind of an end run that I think is destabilizing and potentially quite dangerous.”