I agree that DougR's analysis is a bit simplistic. The EC doesn't help smaller states gain a voice. In fact, the principle that "states" instead of voters are deciding who wins a presidential election is a bit odd. If 49% of the people in Vermont want one candidate, why should Vermont count as a "small state" that needs to be empowered by being allowed to cast all its electoral votes for the other candidate? Doesn't this mean that 51% of Vermonters have forced the other 49% to vote with them? Essentially, whoever is in the minority of their state's population is disenfranchised. You could end up with an election whose popular vote was split 51-49 percent, but in which one candidate got every single electoral vote! Or, as now, the majority of voters could pick one candidate and the other could still be considered the winner. This doesn't make sense.

It is, however, not necessary to amend the constitution to change the way elections run. For one thing, the nitty-gritty specifics of how voters vote and how the electoral college votes are not spelled out in the constitution, although the existence of the college is. We could tomorrow go to a system in which the electors vote proportionally, i.e. 49% of Vermont's electoral college members (or as close to that as possible) would vote for the minority candidate in the above example. This is not unconstitutional, and a few states actually do this.

In fact, electors in the college are not even legally obligated to vote for the candidate that their party instructs them to vote for. I believe the way it works is, if the Republican candidate wins the state, the Republican party picks the electors. They go off to cast their votes. The party picks hard-line party loyalists, because nobody can compel the electors to vote for the Republican. Theoretically, they could all vote Democratic, and no one could do a thing about it. But of course, they would be ostracized by all their Republican friends forever.

It is a truly arcane and bizarre system, but it generally works in that the popular choice wins the presidency 90% of the time. But the other 10% of the time, such as now, it always strikes me as hypocritical when the adminstration tries to lecture the rest of the world about democracy!

We could also, by the way, go to a system in which voters got to pick 1st choice and second choice candidates for proportional voting. This would require changes in state and local voting guidelines all over the country, which might be an administrative nightmare, but it would not be a constitutional danger. In that case, for example, Gore's margin of victory in the popular election would probably have been greater, in that many Nader supporters would have picked him second, while Buchanan's smaller force would have voted for Bush second.