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A novel, but not unprecedented, way of choosing presidential electors is being considered by the Rhode Island Legislature. A House proposal would divide the state into four districts, with the voters in each district electing one of the state’s four presidential electors. No state currently uses this method, though it has been used in the past.

According to the Constitution, each state gets as many presidential electors as it has members of Congress—both the House and Senate. And while the electors belong to the state (which is really the people of each state), the legislature is charged with deciding how best to select them.

For more than a century, nearly all states have used a statewide “winner-takes-all” election to choose the state's presidential electors. Versions of that system emerged in the very first presidential elections, and it maximizes the power of the state as a whole. Yet states have used many other methods.

Maine and Nebraska elect one presidential elector from each Congressional District and the remaining two statewide. State legislatures can also choose presidential electors themselves, but no state has done that since Colorado in 1876 (having just become a state, it lacked resources to hold an election). Other states, starting with the first presidential election, have created special districts to elect presidential electors.

Such a district system is what is before the Rhode Island Legislature. Why might this benefit the Ocean State? The small, Democrat-leaning state has just two members of the House and thus four electoral votes. Using House Districts would divide the state in half, but both of those districts are reliably Democratic and might not draw much attention from presidential campaigns. Creating four districts would likely mean that Democrats could count on winning two or three, but that one or two would be competitive. That same calculation is what led Maine and Nebraska to adopt their systems: the party in power risks losing an electoral vote but attracts more attention to their state.

There are a lot of different ways states can choose their presidential electors, and in recent years we’ve seen a number of states consider legislation that would move away from the winner-takes-all method, including a bill this year in New Hampshire to adopt a Congressional district method. Hopefully more states will look at how they allocate their electoral votes and consider whether there are better ways to represent their people in the presidential election process, in particular those states that have opted to ignore their own voters by joining the National Popular Vote interstate compact.