Yes, the democracy is busted, but Electoral College isn't the problem

"What can I major in at Electoral College?"

Yes, the Electoral College isn't a real college. No late-night studying. No toga parties.

Trying to explain the Electoral College to a foreigner is pretty difficult. Explaining the Electoral College to an American naïve about politics is just as hard. And for many of those who do understand the Electoral College, they want to blow it up.

There is a movement to dance around the requirement. Illinois, Maryland, and New Jersey have signed bills into law noting that the states will get all their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote. The catch is that the bills won't go into effect until the states that approve such a bill would have 270 electoral votes -- the margin a presidential candidate needs to win.

Currently, 48 states adopt a winner-take-all approach. Maine and Nebraska award electoral votes by congressional district.

The elephant in the room is, of course, the 2000 election. Al Gore had more popular votes, but the presidency was awarded for the first time by non-elected officials, going to George W. Bush.

While I applaud the California-based advocacy group National Popular Vote Inc. for trying to fix democracy, there are a few problems with this approach.

The one thing we shouldn't do in a democracy is "fix" something that isn't broken. The issue in 2000 wasn't that Gore was denied the presidency because of the popular vote. He was denied the presidency because of vote fraud and the undemocratic way in which the race was decided.

The 2000 race was only the third time in U.S. history where this issue came up. Let's take a historical look at the previous two times:

-- Grover Cleveland won the popular vote in the 1888 election, 5,534,488 to 5,443,892 for Benjamin Harrison. But Harrison won 19 states to 17 and 233-168 in electoral votes. This chart illustrates how close this race was.

Harrison won Cleveland's home state of New York by a 1% margin. But Cleveland earned 24 electoral votes from states that he won by less than 1% (Connecticut, Virginia, and West Virginia).

-- In 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes was given the presidency in the highly controversial 15-member Electoral Commission. Hayes ended up with a 185-184 electoral margin, though he did win 21 states to 17. Samuel J. Tilden had 4,288,546 votes to 4,034,311.

Though there were reports of severe fraud in several states, South Carolina could have been the difference for Tilden instead of Hayes.

To the untrained eye, the Electoral College seems as out of place as the wigs the men wore who came up with the idea. But there are solid, democratic reasons.

The 12th Amendment prohibits two individuals from running for president and vice president from the same state. For example, this is why Dick Cheney had to "move" from Texas to Wyoming. The primary reason for the amendment is that they didn't want two people running from a larger state; they wanted balance. These states are always as united as they should be, but the democracy is set up to benefit smaller states to balance out larger states.

The Electoral College does the same thing, and works under the same concept.

This BuzzFlash mailbag reader put it quite well:

This is exactly how a law can have unintended consequences. Proportional representation is a great idea, but it has to be enacted with great care. If we rush to put a law into effect in a bunch of blue states and no red states, we guarantee the Republicans will win and actually increase the chance that the Electoral College result will be different than the popular vote totals.

Imagine if California and New York enacted these laws, but Texas and red states didn't. Think about how that would harm the chance of Democrats for years into the future.

Illinois, Maryland, and New Jersey are all considered blue states. Red states, especially large ones, aren't likely to sign such legislation.

Yes, democracy needs to be fixed. But the solutions can't be worse than the problems. If you want to solve what happened in 2000, you need to address the real issues. The Electoral College isn't the problem. The problem is getting the most voters to the polls, having them vote, and then accurately counting their votes.

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