Opinion | A Leading Law Scholar Fears Were Lurching Toward Secession

Here’s how rickety our constitutional system has become: The fate of the 2024 election could hang on the integrity of a single Republican state senator in Nebraska.To understand why requires getting a bit deep in the Electoral College weeds.Almost all states use a winner-take-all system to apportion their presidential electors, but Nebraska and Maine award some electors by congressional district.

In 2020, Joe Biden won one of Nebraska’s five electoral votes, and Donald Trump won one elector from rural Maine.This year Kamala Harris’s clearest path to victory is to take the so-called blue wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, plus one electoral vote in Nebraska.One reason that both states have resisted partisan pressure to switch to winner-take-all is the assumption that if one did so, the other would as well, balancing out any Electoral College effect.

But this year, Republicans waited until it was too late for Maine to change its rules before starting a push to change them in Nebraska.If they succeeded and Harris held the blue wall but lost the other swing states, there would be a tie in the Electoral College.

For the first time in 200 years, the election would go to the House, where each state delegation would get one vote and Trump would almost certainly be installed as president.So far, one man, State Senator Mike McDonnell, who defected from the Democratic Party this spring, is standing in the Republican Party’s way.We should all be grateful for his courage.

But the pressure on him from his new party will be intense, and he can still change his mind in the coming weeks.Whether or not McDonnell remains steadfast, this is a preposterous way to run a purportedly democratic superpower.The Electoral College — created in part, as the scholar Akhil Reed Amar has shown, to protect slavery — has already given us two presidents in the 21st century who lost the popular vote, and it continues to warp our politics.

It is one reason Erwin Cheme...