Shiloh Bucher pointed me to an article on the electoral college, and why it would be a very bad idea to get rid of it. Over a year after the Florida debacle, it's easier to discuss this a little more dispassionately, but I suspect that whatever hysterical movements were afoot at that time to abolish it are also much diminished, to the point of irrelevance.

But it's worth making one more point about it, that was never really discussed at the time. Many bemoaned the fact that Bush was elected with less than fifty percent of the vote (though he got a higher percentage than Bill Clinton in either election), and more legitimately, that he got a lower percentage than Gore. But you can't change the rules after the election. I know for a fact that in my case, had the election been predicated on the most popular vote, I would have voted differently.

I wanted Bush to win, given the realistic alternatives, but because I am a Wyoming voter, I knew that it was safe to vote for someone else, because Bush was going to win Wyoming handily anyway. I also knew that the popular vote could be close (though I expected Bush to win it with margin to spare). As it turned out, I voted for Nader (holding my nose) just on the theory that if he got enough votes he would be eligible for future public funding, which would make him an ongoing thorn in the Democrats' side, and I was confident that he had no chance of winning, especially in Wyoming. But if it was to have been solely decided on the popular vote, I certainly would have voted for Bush.

That's just one reason why attempts to change the rules after the election were just...wrong.

I'd like to chime in with my favorite reason not to abolish the Electoral College: The all or nothing system of awarding electoral college votes leads to stable governments. If a government is to get anything done someone has got to be in control. With proportional election no one is in control. The fighting over the election would still be going on and nothing would have been accomplished.

What caught my eye was the "throwaway" about voting for Nader so that he would be "a thorn in the Democrats' side." The election in my state was close enough that I didn't dare vote for anyone else but Bush, I did and do wish both Nader and Buchanan well. Not very well, but a little well. Buchanan bleeds the flaming racist idiots out of the Republican party and Nader bleeds the unthinking, knee-jerk so-far-to-the-left they are shaking hands with the ultra right idiots out of the Democratic party. I figured both parties and our nation would be better for more rational main parties.

Alas, neither Nader nor Buchanan achieved much following. Oh well, they're still around to try next time.

If you thought Florida was bad, I have some news for you. Under a direct popular vote, it would have been 50 times worse.

Imagine for a moment a scenario where two candidates are 50,000 or fewer votes apart in the popular vote. It's unlikely, but it could happen. Nixon and Kennedy were 100,000 votes apart, and if you extrapolate the results from Florida and New Mexico to the national level, you'd get an election that was much closer.

At that level, we really wouldn't know who had won. Dave Leip, who runs the Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections and does the best job of tabulating votes of anyone I know, will tell you that most of the time, state and county officials can't even agree on what the exact vote count really was. It's not uncommon for the national victory margin to fluctuate by tens of thousands of votes in the weeks after the election, and for single counties to mis-count thousands of votes.

Imagine, if you will, a situation where ALL of America's 3,154 county-level jurisdictions were subject to Palm Beach-like shenanigans. Imagine if Chicago, New York, L.A., Baltimore, Detroit, and San Francisco (where full ballot boxes were recently found floating in the Bay) all became fair game for operatives trolling to "find" extra votes -- all at the same time. Imagine endless recounts, not just in 60 counties and 6,000 precincts, but in 3,000 counties and 180,000 precincts, with a different standard applied to each one.

With the electoral college, the result is finite and uncertainty is limited to a single state -- even Florida ended in an orderly fashion in time for Constitutional obligations to be met. Junk the electoral college, and next time, the Florida fiasco will go national.

Here's a link to a mathematical defense of the electoral college. It states that individual voters actually have a bigger influence on the outcome in an electoral college than in a popular vote:

http://www.avagara.com/e_c/reference/00012001.htm

Here's a link to a mathematical defense of the electoral college. It states that individual voters actually have a bigger influence on the outcome in an electoral college than in a popular vote:

http://www.avagara.com/e_c/reference/00012001.htm

The primary effect of the electoral college is to force candidates to campaign outside of the main population centers of the nation. For more than two hundred years, it has performed as advertised. In addition, the electoral college completely eliminates the incentive to cheat in the state or states where the candidate is strongest. This is precisely where cheating would be easiest and least detectable, and therefore most likely. (Your guy is going to win there anyway and get all the state’s electoral votes. There is no need to cheat.) This would not be the case in the absence of the electoral college or under the Maine-Nebraska scheme.

Finally, under the winner take all system which is in effect throughout most of the nation, the ballot box stuffers in closer states must operate on a large scale to influence statewide results. This makes detection easier and therefore more likely. The same effect is not achieved under the Maine-Nebraska district by district scheme, since a series of districts could be swung with widely scattered efforts involving fewer fraudulent votes.

The Founders were proud of the electoral college. They had reason to be. It ain’t broke. Don’t fix it.