It happens often that calamitous election outcomes are attributed to democratic dysfunction, and reform proposals follow from there. Those Republicans who are not deeply cynical about voter ID--and there are a fair number of those--sincerely and mistakenly believe that they lose elections because of illegal voting. Years ago, they convinced themselves that structural bias would keep Democrats in power in the Congress until the nation adopted mandatory term limits. Democrats in 1971 famously believed Richard Nixon reinvented himself politically through dark manipulations of television advertising, and to weaken his reelection prospects, their ranks in the Congress enacted a short-lived law that limited candidate media expenditures.

Of course, not all reform proposals born of frustration are misconceived or doomed to fail. But there are risks, some of which are apparent in a new reform initiative from Professor Lawrence Lessig’s: litigation to establish that states may not allocate Electoral Votes on a winner-take-all basis (WTA). His argument is not entirely about a change in the rules to achieve preferred outcomes or prevent bad ones. He does contend that, by driving active campaigning to a handful of states, WTA limits meaningful participation in the election to a handful of states whose voters see the most paid advertising and enjoy--if that is right word--the most visits from candidates and their surrogates.

Professor Lessig’s next argument, however, is more political. He sees WTA as putting more power in the hands of older white voters in industrial heartland states. It is fairly clear, then, that this proposed litigation is a response to the election of 2016, grounded in the belief that a change in the allocation would work a shift in the balance of national political power. And we have seen a reaction like this before. In 2012, the Democratic nominee won Pennsylvania, and those who were bitter about WTA were Republicans state legislators who threatened to shift a Congressional-district based allocation. Indeed the same move among Republicans is now underway in the State of Virginia and Minnesota.

So this is one risk: guessing wrong, as the Republicans did in 2012. Had they succeeded then, the congressional district-based allocation of electoral votes would have benefited Hillary Clinton in 2016. Politics is not static, and the judgment about the political effects of specific allocations is hazardous.

Another risk is misreading, or reading narrowly, the requirements of democratic participation in the concrete setting of the politics of the era.