WASHINGTON — Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, busy seeking re-election next month, found time the other day to deliver a blow to political common sense.

He vetoed a bill passed by the Democratic-controlled state legislature that would have required allocation of the state's whopping 55 electoral votes — the largest single batch available on presidential election day — to the winner of the national popular vote.

Had Schwarzenegger signed the bill, his action could well have given major impetus to a drive in the states to assure that in future presidential campaigns the candidate who has won the most votes is elected.

Right now, all but two states — Maine and Nebraska — allocate all their electoral states' votes to the winner of the state's popular vote. An organization called National Popular Vote says it has sponsors of legislation in 31 states that would commit them to "interstate compacts" that would, in effect, end-run the existing process.

Under the scheme, devised by a computer scientist at Stanford named John Koza, enough states to deliver the required electoral majority of 270 votes would agree to give their blocs to the popular-vote winner, without having to formally scrap the Electoral College.

The compact would take effect only when enough states had signed on to guarantee the 270. Koza says the group will have bills in all 50 states, including California again, in time for their 2007 legislative sessions. He adds that it's "not realistic" the change could be achieved in time for the 2008 election, "but possible."

Past efforts to get rid of the Electoral College by amending the Constitution have gotten nowhere, mainly because smaller states see this anachronistic device as a protection for their voice in picking the president. Neither in Congress nor in the state legislatures have their representatives been willing to kill it off by required super-majorities.

But memories are still fresh about the 2000 election, and so is anger among Democrats. The Democrats' nominee, Al Gore, won half a million more popular votes than Republican nominee George W. Bush, but lost out in the Electoral College as a result of a controversial decision by the Republican-majority Supreme Court.

Democrats take no solace, either, in knowing that they came close enough in 2004 that their man, John Kerry, would be in the White House today had Ohio's electoral votes gone narrowly the other way — though in that case Bush also carried the popular vote.

Bush's Electoral College victory in 2000 was the fourth time — or the fifth, according to some reasoning — in which the loser of the popular vote wound up in the White House. John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 and Benjamin Harrison in 1888 all preceded Bush in that dubious distinction. And John F. Kennedy in 1960 might have joined them but for a disputed way in which Alabama calculated its popular vote.

One of the corollary arguments for the scheme, Koza says, is that it would induce the presidential candidates to visit, and spend advertising money, in most of what he calls "spectator states" that lose out in the approach of campaigning almost exclusively in so-called battleground states offering the most electoral votes.

States have always been free, he says, to enter into such contractual agreements among themselves, and have done so in such areas as the sharing of water resources and interstate transportation facilities.

In California, he says, Schwarzenegger was ill-informed in claiming the people of the state opposed the bill. Even if he is re-elected on Nov. 7 and were to veto it again next year, Koza says, the proponents of the national popular vote could still offer the idea as an initiative, leaving the decision to the voters.

Koza also argues that, with the prospect of yet another very close presidential election in 2008, with no incumbent running, the issue of the Electoral College may get increased attention. But politicians and voters often have a way of ignoring accidents waiting to happen until it's too late to prevent them.

What nobody wants is a rerun of 2000. Some of the ballot fiascos have been addressed, but not the specter of the man or woman most Americans have voted for being denied by an outmoded idea.