TWO Bears,

you're right about the electoral college not helping either "side" or "party" disproportionately. Overall, for example, it usually results in thousands of liberal Alabamans being disenfranchised and thousands of conservative Vermonters. Whether there are more of one group than the other is an accident of history, not a flaw of the electoral college system. The fact that people are disenfranchised at all, however, is a serious flaw.

However, you have also fallen for a common misconception about the electoral college, which is that it prevents massive nationwide recounts. In fact, there has never been a US election whose popular vote was close enough to warrant a recount. It is the fact of the all-or-nothing electoral college that artificially creates a situation where a few hundred votes in Florida might throw the election to either side. This encourages candidates to seek recounts in those states. Gore won the popular vote by well over half a million votes, for example, so in a popular election no recount would have occurred.

It's also not true to suggest that the electoral college has worked the same way for over two hundred years. There have been changes along the way. Electors were once chosen by state legislatures, for example: Americans in those states did not vote for President at all. Many of the changes have been state-by-state, so it is not easy to chart them. The specific workings of how electors are chosen and how they vote are not in the Constitution at all. The existence of the college is mandated, as is the methhod by which their votes are counted once they are cast, and how that count translated into choosing a President. But how electors cast their votes (eg. by all-or-nothing or proportionally, or by personal preference) is not spelled out.

What this means, two bears, is that the all-or-nothing method of calculating electoral college votes is not mandated in the Constitution, as you seem to think, and indeed is not followed in Maine or Nebraska. The State Legislature decides how the electors of each state vote. The fascinating thing is that all-or-nothing usually favors whichever party wins the legislature; that party is likely to have at least a slim majority in the presidential election, which through all-or-nothing becomes a sizeable bloc vote. So no matter which party is in power in any state, it behooves that party to maintain the all-or-nothing system so they can disenfranchise their opponents' voters. It's a bit perverse, and both parties are equally guilty.

By the way, two bears, it would do YOU good to read the constitution on the electoral college. You seem to have absorbed a lot of media distortions yourself.