This past Tuesday, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) introduced a bill that would amend the Constitution, abolishing the Electoral College and making the winner of future presidential elections the winner of the popular vote. This in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s loss in her bid for the presidency, despite winning the popular vote by about 1.5 million votes.

I don’t tend to agree with Barbara Boxer on much, but our interests our solidly aligned in this: there needs to be a change.

While some will call for the abolition of the Electoral College, doing so is a dangerous precedent. In a country as large and diverse as the United States, in both political and geographic terms, a system like the Electoral College ensures solid protection against a regional candidate marshaling enough support to capture a majority or large plurality of voters sufficient to win the election, whilst ignoring other areas of the country. For example, I might be able to draw tens of millions of voters with a West Coast-centric platform by running strong in California, Oregon, and Washington, but I can only win 74 total electoral votes between those three states, almost 200 fewer than needed to win the election in the Electoral College.

In addition, there is a very clear urban/rural divide in the United States today. An Electoral College prevents a candidate from only focusing on the largest population centers while ignoring America’s rural voters. One could just as easily draw tens of millions of votes with a city-centric platform.

So what change would I like to see? I believe Boxer’s proposal and that by others over the years to shift to a purely popular vote would be counterproductive to the preservation of American democracy. I also agree that a system where a candidate can get 1.5 million votes than another and still lose is, as Donald Trump is fond of saying, “rigged”.

The solution lies in one that’s not even originally my own, but has been a mainstay of electoral oddity since 1969 and 1991. I’m of course talking about Maine and Nebraska, respectively.

Both states break from the other 50 in that they do not award their electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis, rather first awarding two electoral votes to the winner of the vote in the whole state (equivalent to each state’s two Senate seats) and each other vote by the vote winner in each Congressional district (three for Nebraska and two for Maine).

Being that Nebraska and Maine are fairly solid red and blue states, respectively, the possibility of splitting the vote was little more than fancy for the longest time…that is until Barack Obama won Nebraska’s 2^nd Congressional District in 2008 and Donald Trump won Maine’s 2^nd Congressional District in 2016. While neither instance of electoral vote splitting actually led to a significant difference in the outcome of the election (both candidates being well over the required 270 electoral votes), the fact they did split presents an interesting precedent: why not carry out a similar system nationwide?

The main problem with the Electoral College nowadays is not that it ignores the popular vote (state popular votes are actually how every state determines who to assign their electors to), but that it ignores the minority vote in a state by state basis.

For example, in 2016 Donald Trump won approximately 48% of the vote while Hillary Clinton won roughly 47% in my home state of Wisconsin. However, Donald Trump won 100% of Wisconsin’s electoral vote, because Wisconsin is a winner-take-all state. So where is the voice of those 47%? They have no representation in an electoral sense. They’re candidate didn’t win 47% of the electoral votes, the votes that really matter.

Adopting the Maine-Nebraska System nationwide would go a long ways towards remedying this. By awarding votes per Congressional district for each state, the electoral vote totals should much more closely mimic that of the popular vote (the system would acknowledge that states aren’t solid blocs of red or blue and split votes accordingly). It would also eliminate the concept of swing states in exchange for swing districts which are much more profuse and geographically widespread. Campaigning in swing states would still be important as each statewide vote would still award two electors, but they would decrease in importance as campaigning in swing districts increased.

While this system wouldn’t solve every problem, it would definitely be a step forward, as well as a compromise between the abolition and stalwart factions that see the future of the Electoral College as wholly one way or the other. I personally believe it would hold bipartisan support in both Congress and in the states.

And who better to enact such a reform than Donald Trump? Trump who claimed in every step of this process, from the primaries to the general that the election was rigged against him. Trump who has promised to #DrainTheSwamp. Donald Trump must realize that his win in 2016 was a precarious one. A shift in some 55,000 votes (out of more than 120 million cast nationwide) between Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania and Hillary Clinton would be the one swearing the oath of office on January 20^th, not him. His election was a statement, to be sure, but it was also a further cementing of a polarized America.

Trump will surely take his election as a mandate to enact the reforms that propelled him to the Oval Office in the first place, but he must realize that it is not without caveats. A majority of people in this country still do not like Donald Trump. Many even despise him. I’d even go as far as to say that a majority of Republicans do not like Donald Trump, though they are willing to work with him if they think it will advance their platform.

Reforming the Electoral College, and especially reforming it within the first 100 days of his administration, would go a long ways toward building Trump’s repertoire with all political factions and the American people general. While Barbara Boxer will retire and not be a part of the subsequent Congress in 2017, and her bill is unlikely to gain any traction in a Congress still dominated by Republicans sitting under a lame-duck president, Trump should still seize the opportunity to reshape how America elects its president.

In a case where the interests of the President-elect and the nation align, it makes too much sense not to.