Rick LaRue in the Fulcrum. This piece echoes the one earlier this year by Larry Schwartztol and Justin Florence in The Atlantic: “Amending the Constitution Is Impossible Until Suddenly It’s Not.” It is also possible that the threat of a constitutional convention could spur the adoption of specific amendments, as it did with the Seventeenth Amendment’s adoption of direct election of U.S. senators. But Alex Keyssar’s important book Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? is an important cautionary tale concerning the immense difficulty of electoral reform by means of constitutional amendment, even when America’s voters overwhelmingly want the reform in question.