One man, one vote ideal lost in presidential electoral college.

IF you're a Bostonian and plan to vote for President Bush in November, don't expect your vote to count.

Don't feel bad. Not a single Texas vote for Sen. John Kerry will matter, either.

We can thank the Electoral College and stale legislatures lot making voting, that key to democracy. meaningless for millions of Americans.

This isn't another diatribe about Bush being an un-elected president. It is a diatribe about the Electoral College stripping Republicans, Democrats and independents of their votes.

Consider that more than 47 million people cast irrelevant votes for president in 2000 because their favorite candidate piled up fewer votes in their state than another guy did.

Out of 104 million votes cast for Bush, Al Gore and Ralph Nader, 47 million people punched cards, touched screens or pulled levers to cast votes that simply didn't matter.

That's because in all but two states, the candidate who gets the biggest chunk of the popular vote wins all of the electoral votes.

"It violates political equality," says George C. Edwards III, a political science professor at Texas A&M University and co-author of "Why the Electoral College is Bad for America."

The winner-take-all rule, used in all states except Maine and Nebraska, means any vote cast for a presidential favorite who doesn't carry the state does not count.

Electoral votes are the only votes that count, as we saw when Gore won the national popular vote by 544,000 ballots in 200(.) but lost the White House.

Whatever happened to one person, one vote?

The use of electoral votes in presidential elections is required by the U.S. Constitution, but even those votes don't carry equal weight. Each state gets as many electors as it has members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. Because every state has two senators no matter what its population, residents of small states get more electoral wallop than those in large states.

In this year's campaign, all attention focuses on the so-called battleground states. The battleground is where the campaigning occurs, where most campaign ads air, where what voters want matters. By contrast, in states like Georgia, "It does make it lonely sometimes," says Bobby Kahn, chair of the state Democratic Party.

Because it's presumed Bush territory, Georgia hadn't seen a national candidate for weeks when Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards showed up for two Democratic National Committee fundraisers in Atlanta.

Them was a time when the winner didn't take all. Prof. Edwards says state legislatures adopted those rules in the 19th century after political parties developed and took control of state houses.

In the late 20th century, lawmakers in Nebraska and Maine, each with four electoral votes, changed it so that two electors represent the winner in each of two congressional districts, while the candidate who takes the state gets two bonus electors.

So far, there hasn't been a split delegation from either state. Since 2000, at least a dozen state legislatures have rejected bills to end winner-take-all.

And so, Colorado citizens launched a petition drive to change the system. If it succeeds, Colorado's nine electoral votes will be cast in direct proportion to the popular vote for president, with no candidate given a bonus elector.

Fairer it is. It would be more fair if every state and the District of Columbia had the same proportional rule. Fairest of all would be to abolish the Electoral College and have direct election for president and vice president.

Arm Woolner is a columnist with Bloomberg News.