AMERICANS ARE GIVING up on politics. Look at any statistic you like; the news is the same. A record-low 36 percent of eligible Californians voted in last November's midterm elections. In 2000, only half of eligible voters contested the tightest presidential race in U.S. history. A mere 8.5 percent of 18- and 19-year-olds bothered to cast a ballot in 1998. We seem to be witnessing what Johns Hopkins University political science professors Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg have called "the slow-motion collapse of American citizenship."

The story is both familiar and depressing. But at least we know where to put the blame: campaign consultants, career politicians, corporate lobbyists, idiot media. Right?

Wrong, argues Steven Hill in Fixing Elections: The Failure of America's Winner-Take-All Politics. Blaming the usual suspects is "a bit like having your car break down on the side of the road, totally dead, and towing it to a mechanic, who pronounces, 'It's the headlights. You have to fix the headlights.' "

Plainly, you have to fix the engine. And for Hill, co-founder of the Center for Voting and Democracy, the engine of American democracy is our wheezing, two-cylinder, winner-take-all voting system. Winner take all, he insists, has split the nation into polarized camps (he calls them Bushlandia and New Goreia), left millions without meaningful representation, and driven the United States toward "fractious, voterless post-democracy."

It's not such a far-fetched idea. Like Hill, the framers of the Constitution believed that "voting systems matter." That's why they saddled us with the electoral college. (Thanks, guys!) And there's no arguing that the American political system they created, a wonder of 18th-century democracy, is starting to show its age. The number of members in the U.S. House of Representatives hasn't changed since 1910. Demographic trends have turned the U.S. Senate's small-state bias into a monstrous political subsidy (affirmative action for conservatives, Hill calls it), in which a third of the nation's senators represent a mere 7 percent of the United States' population.

A small but telling detail: while other modern democracies schedule their elections on weekends or holidays, we still hold ours on the day decreed by President James Polk in 1845 - the first Tuesday in November, when the harvest had been gathered, the roads were still passable, and folks out in the country could ride into town the day after the Sabbath.

Modern America is very different from the place the framers knew. There are hundreds of millions more of us. We tend to live in the city rather than the country. We are highly mobile. We follow jobs from state to state. We speak more languages and worship more (or fewer) gods than our predecessors ever dreamed.

But still we elect our representatives with 18th-century winner-take-all elections. And hardly anyone gives it a second thought. Hill observes, with the dismay of a true election geek, "Most people in the United States ... don't speak even the most basic lexicon of voting systems - terminology like winner take all, first past the post, single-seat districts, multiseat districts, proportional representation, plurality at large, choice voting, single transferable vote, cumulative voting, limited voting and the like."

Most of us would never know it, but almost all of our elections use a first-past-the-post, winner-take-all system. The candidate who receives the most votes wins (first past the post). The winning candidates shower their supporters with political goodies (winner take all); the losing side gets nothing.

Winner-take-all elections are ruthless. A single candidate wins a single office, which usually governs a clearly defined geographical region. As advocates like to say, you always know who to complain to. (Whether your elected officials have an incentive to listen is another matter, as Hill points out.)

But winner take all has several drawbacks. It doesn't ensure majority rule. It alienates the losing side. It encourages gerrymandering, which destroys competition, discourages turnout, and leaves millions of unfortunate people "orphaned" in opposition districts in which their votes don't register. It elevates the suggestible, uninformed swing voter to the heights of political power. And perhaps worst of all, it squeezes out the third parties that Hill considers "the laboratory of new political ideas." Winner take all reduces politics to a fight between two dogs over a juicy bone.

Hill, who managed the successful 2002 campaign for San Francisco's instant-runoff measure, Proposition A, proposes a revolutionary solution to this dilemma: smash the gerrymandered two-party system by replacing winner-take-all elections with modern, flexible, "proportional" voting systems.

Under winner take all, third parties are always out of luck (and out of power). The best they can hope for is to play the role of spoiler. But in proportional elections, third parties can win as large a percentage of available seats as they do of the popular vote (20 percent of the vote in a 10-seat election wins 2 seats). Suddenly, they have a fighting chance. Voters no longer have to take shelter under one of the two big tents.

Hill suggests that the benefits of proportional elections could be considerable. They would leave many fewer "orphaned" voters, increase voter turnout, lessen incentives for negative campaigning, and make gerrymandering obsolete.

Fixing Elections is a much-needed field guide to our winner-take-all political landscape and the monsters that roam it, bloody of tooth and red of claw.

Chris Ulbrich is a writer who lives in Oakland.