Electoral College reform's constitutionality?

[Steve Eppley]

Demorep1 points out a possible constitutional snag:
Art. I Sec. 10 Clause 3: 
  No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of
  Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into
  any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power,
  or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger
  as will not admit of delay. 

Uh oh.  Looks like the Supreme Court might find an excuse to overturn 
states' attempts to award all their electoral college delegates to
the candidate who would win if the states' pooled their ballots.

I'd like to see more info on how this clause has been interpreted in
the past.  Have there been no multistate agreements without
Congress' consent, like extradition procedures?  No regional
agreements, like shared waste dumps?

Has Congress passed any laws which could be interpreted as granting 
consent to states to agree to pool their ballots?

* *

Perhaps the clause could be worded in a really clever way so it 
wouldn't literally be an agreement between states:

1. Each reforming state would immediately electronically publish its
voters' ballots (which would allow other states to do what they want
with them).  This doesn't involve an agreement with other states.

2. Each reforming state would include other states' ranked ballots
in its own tally if they're available, except that ballots from
states which decide to award their delegates to a candidate other
than the combined winner would be deleted from the tally.  This is 
a splitting of legal hairs: it looks to my unschooled eye like no
explicit agreement is being made between states, since each state
would be acting independently(?) to tally whatever ballots and 
award delegates as it sees fit.

It couldn't hurt to include the electoral college reform clause in
single-winner reform initiatives as long as it's accompanied by the
appropriate language which makes the initiatives' clauses severable
if some clauses are found unconstitutional. 

---Steve     (Steve Eppley    seppley at alumni.caltech.edu)