1) The Electoral College doesn't exist apart from the rest of the constitutional system. Change one element, and you affect them all. Jettison the Electoral College, and you undermine the two-party system. Without the Electoral College, which pretty much gives the winner in each state all that state's electoral votes, there would be little incentive to have just two parties. If the popular vote were all, everybody could vote for their favorite candidate first time around-Ralph Nader, Pat Buchanan, Howard Dean, whoever.

Boy, wouldn't everybody be surprised when one or the other "major" candidates, or both, failed to make it into the run-off? In the last French election, the respectable if colorless left-of-center candidate didn't. A xenophobic right-winger did. In the run-off, the electorate got a choice between right and righter. In the great poker game of American politics, who knows how wild the two remaining cards would be?

2) At least the Electoral College confines fights over contested votes to decisive states. There's no percentage in contesting votes nationwide. But suppose the presidential election hinged on disputed vote totals across the country, or on just a few thousand in traditionally suspect locales like South Texas or Cook County, Ill., in addition to South Florida?

Every presidential election could go on as long as the last one, if not longer. A note to all those who thought the 2000 election was a confused mess: If the Electoral College is junked, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

3) Just imagine the deals that could be cut between the first and second rounds of such a presidential election. A couple of presidential elections have wound up in the House of Representatives and both were marked with tricky negotiations.

But those were long-ago exceptions to a system that, almost every other election year, has gone so smoothly, quickly, and fairly that most Americans may have no idea how the Electoral College works. Maybe we should examine it before we discard it. Because, without an Electoral College to effectively limit the field to two candidates from the first, the negotiating that would go on before a run-off might make Corrupt Bargain sound like an understatement.

4) For all its ups and downs over the past two centuries, the Electoral College is a product of tradition, change and adjustments over the years in short, hard-won experience.

I AGREE with ya on this topic.........IGMY :rolleyes:

I've always felt the Electoral College to be a kind of a "checks and balances" for our GREAT country. Everyone should have to answer to someone and the EC are just that. Our forefathers would be proud.

I think they are WISE. I think they are above the POLITICS. And, I BELIEVE they will DO WHAT'S BEST FOR AMERICA!

On this we agree..................Andrew Paul

The only problem is that it needs to be corrected so it cannot happen that someone can win the popular vote and not the electoral vote. 500,000 votes did not count because of this. Many people will say, why vote at all? And they are saying it now, and no one has an answer to it.

Hmmm? Your correct also ErinB ;)

The PROBLEM in 2000 was FLORIDA! That's a WHOLE DIFFERENT BALL GAME!

Maybe the ELECTORAL COLLEGE were as much in the dark as MOST of AMERICA was?

Will it happen again?


Have a good day :) .................Andrew Paul