Alternate reforms fail for collective action (Score 1)

The genius of the proposal is that it gets around the collective action problems raised by alternatives like the one you sketch out. It is not in the interest of an individual state to divide its electoral votes proportionally, since it can lower the stakes of the election. Nor is it usually in the interest of the state legislators who are in the majority in a state government to vote for such a proposal, because it will probably reduce the electoral votes that go towards presidential candidates from thier party (ie if the state legislature is controlled by Democrats, the state's electoral votes probably usually go to democrats). The nice thing about this compact is it doesn't go into effect until there are enough states to get an electoral college majority, so there's no cost to states signing on in the meantime. The proposal works less to shift electoral power from less populous to more populous states (recall that the popular vote winner has won all but two American presidential elections, and the Seante ain't going anywhere) than from "competitive" to "non-competitive" states. Since (almost) all states are winner-take-all and no individual state has an incentive to granularize its electors, presidential candidates from both parties are free to all but ignore the particular interests of states where one candidate or the other has a sufficiently large lead. The current system distorts policy by overemphasizing interest groups and issues that are important to the voters who happen to live in states with roughly equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats.