Time to Junk the Electoral College?

A crazy election raises the question

YES The Electoral College is a hopelessly outdated system and we must abolish it. Direct election would resonate far better with the American value of one person, one vote. Indeed, the college was designed at the founding of the country to help one group--white Southern males--and this year, it has apparently done just that.

In 1787, James Wilson of Pennsylvania proposed direct election of the President. But James Madison of Virginia worried that such a system would hurt the South, which would have been outnumbered in a direct election system. The creation of the Electoral College got around that: As part of the deal, Southern states, in computing their share of electoral votes, could count slaves as three fifths of a person each--even though slaves could not vote.

Now fast-forward to Election Night 2000. Al Gore received the most popular votes nationwide, but may well lose the contest for electoral votes. Once again, the system has tilted toward white Southern males, a group in which exit polls show Mr. Bush won big.

Advocates of the current system say it forces presidential candidates to take into account individual state interests. But candidates don't appeal so much to state interests as to demographic groups within states. And direct election could give states an incentive to increase voter turnout, because the more voters a state turned out, the bigger its role in national elections.

AKHIL REED AMAR Professor of Law Yale University Times Op-Ed Page

NO The real source of our recent confusion was the closeness of the election, not our system for electing Presidents.

The Electoral College is not undemocratic. It lets all votes be counted, but in the states, not in a national vote count. We have a similar system for electing Congress, where each vote is counted in a district. Occasionally, the national vote for Congress favors one party, while the majority of Congress favors the other. All the presidential candidates know the rules in advance, and it is only in the closest elections that the popular vote and the electoral vote go in opposite directions.

Most opponents of the Electoral College call for a direct popular election, but our current election troubles would only be magnified in such a system. Instead of a recount in Florida, a close direct popular election might require recounts in every polling place in America. Would we want to examine voting irregularities, lost ballots, and other difficulties across the land?

Finally, the Electoral College system encourages presidential candidates to seek votes in smaller states and rural areas as well as big cities. If we had a direct popular election, presidential candidates might focus their efforts entirely on big cities with large television markets.

Before we change our system, let's make sure we're not trading it in for something worse.

John C. FORTIER American Enterprise Institute