To the many good defenses of the Electoral College have been previously posted, I add this:

Quit whining about the popular vote winner losing the election. Candidates are required to get the most electoral votes, not the most popular votes.

If candidates actually were required to get the most popular votes we would see a substantially different campaign with emphasis on different issues, different commercials and different geographical coverage. Different color mud would be slung, different widows and orphans exploited.

If popular vote was the name of the game, Bush V. Gore would have been a completely different campaign in 2000. It is uncertain whether or not Gore would have won a popular vote that actually counted.

And for many reasons already articulated it is certain that a popular election would be no "fairer," and in reality might be less fair than our current system.

Today's system favors large and politically diverse states (Florida), small states (New Hampshire) and rural states (Nebraska) at the expense of about 8 large urban areas. A popular vote system overwhelmingly favors a few urban areas and disenfranchises virtually everyone else.

As for the Republican proposal, it's a pundit full-employment act as Kaus pointed out days ago. It's DOA, but a useful distraction for both sides.

moodyguppy, you are so right. The idea of direct Presidential election scares the daylights out of me. It scared the Framers as well, which is why the Electoral College was created in the first place. The Framers were afraid of more populous states stomping all over the interests of less populous ones. This explains why each state has two Senators as well. It insures equal representation at the national level, that all voices are heard.

If the people who believe direct presidential election will eliminate the "evils" of the Electoral College stopped to think the issues through, and consider why the Framers included such a curious thing as the Electoral College in the Constitution to start with, they would come to see the Framers were wise indeed. I remember a study done before the 2004 election, the last time this issue came up on the national radar. That study said that if we went to direct election, in order to win a candidate would not need to carry so much as a single state. A candidate would need, however, to substantially carry New York City, Detroit, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami and perhaps San Francisco and their suburbs in order to win the election.

Somehow I don't think the Founding Fathers had in mind a system where a potential president only has to campaign in cities that have major league baseball franchises in order to win the White House. I personally do not give a damn what these fuzzy thinkers believe. Any system that allows major urban areas to ignore the rest of the country is insane. The potential for changes that would trample our civil rights by electing a politician who owes loyalty only to a few cities as opposed to the entire nation is scary. It strikes me that a change away from what has worked fairly well for us for two centuries is a recipe for the Balkanization of America.

As conceived by the Founders, the President is an executive functionary; he takes an oath to defend and protect the constitution. He is not a representative of the people and has no obligation to them. He is chosen by a committee whose members are answerable to their respective state governments, and serves at the pleasure of another committee likewise answerable to the states. The president's election by nation-wide popular vote would not have been physically practical within the bounds of 18th century communications even if somone had imagined such an absurdity to be desirable. Putting aside the question of the wisdom of politicians of yesteryear, the electoral college was a practical way of choosing the president.

In the current age, the Lord God 51% is very potent and will be heard, one way or another.

It isn't just who wins that becomes an issue, it is who votes? I know democrats in Texas and republicans in California who don't bother to vote because their vote won't count.

The electoral college was implemented because it was a way to bribe the southern states to join the federation by allowing them to count slaves when calculating the number of representatives and electors. The electoral college has never been about implementing a republic nor was it run uniformly by each and every state.

It makes no sense to maintain it at this time. It makes a handful of states the only places to actually have a presidential campaign. The rest of us are observers.

Cyrano,

Your's is a strawman argument based on a false hypothesis. These large cities already carry disproportional weight. They jsut carry it in their respective states. Why do you argue that highly populated areas shouldn't carry more political weight? After all, they're highly populated areas because there are more citizens there.

I suspect that you are biased because you think that the electoral college currently provides an unfair advantage to states with less population density and you assume that you are more politically aligned with these people for some reason. I question the accuracy of your presumption and find it to be moot over an extended period of time at any rate.

You're missing the whole point. Density of population has nothing to do with representation of regional interests.

There aren't a lot of farmers in Brooklyn.

What you are advocating is that people who own large amounts of property should be considered supercitizens and should therefore be assigned greater representation than those citizens of more limited means.

This is not a new concept. There was much discussion of this issue during the founding of our nation. It has been generally accepted conventional wisdom that the United States should not be an aristocracy.

Opinions still vary on this issue.

If you are a democrat in Texas you get no representation. If you are a republican in California...same problem.

The electoral college does not help to represent a state, any better than the popular vote does. A state does not deserve any greater representation just because it has a smaller population. What interests does the state of Rhode Island have that require its voters to be valued at 4 times that of the voters in Colorado?

In California each elector represents 226,000 voters. In Rhode Island the number falls to 48,000 voters.