FOR MONTHS — ever since John Kerry won the Democratic nomination over candidates with whom I was much more comfortable — I struggled with the unattractive choice between a man with the most arrogantly ideological, and so often wrongheaded, approach to domestic policy in my lifetime, and a man whose approach to issue after issue was hard to get a handle on, and whose commitment to doing whatever it takes to make sure the right side prevails in this clash between civilization and chaos seemed at best questionable.

Then just before the drop-dead time to make a decision, I stopped struggling. And I came to terms with the unthinkable: I would not vote for president.

I felt disturbingly at peace with this decision to dodge my civic obligation, because I realized that, thanks to an antiquated electoral system that has shed nearly all of its virtues while picking up vice after vice, I had no civic obligation to cast a vote for president.

Our state and federal lawmakers gave me permission to be irresponsible. No. They encouraged me to. The unthinkable became thinkable when I came emotionally to terms with what I had long known intellectually: My vote for president this year didn’t matter.

Because of the way the presidential race is counted, I — like everyone else in all but a handful of states who had not made up their minds by, say, about 2001 — would have no say in the election of the next president. Worse, since their numbers are so much larger, neither would the Kerry supporters in this and other Bush states, or the Bush supporters in New York and other Kerry states.

I came to terms with something else, as well: my persistently nagging concern that there is something inherently wrong with the way we select a president.

The nagging started when the candidates zeroed in so quickly on a handful of swing states and made it clear that they would ignore the rest of us. Not just those of us in South Carolina, whose tiny numbers could, frankly, justify the inattention, but also voters in California, New York, Texas and all the other giant states that are decidedly and consistently in one camp or the other.

Oh, it was nice not to have to endure the bombardment of the horrendous presidential TV ads — although perhaps they might have made the local ads seem a bit less jarring. But wasn’t it wrong, I kept wondering, that the candidates could ignore the policy concerns of most voters — based purely on where they lived?

Until this year, I had supported the Electoral College, because I am a great defender of the political principles it is supposed to reflect: a representative democracy, or republic, rather than a pure democracy; and a federal, rather than a national, government,

But the fact is that it advances neither.

As originally envisioned, and as practiced in the early part of our history, the Electoral College did advance the idea of a republic: Voters (or state legislatures) would cast their ballots not for a presidential candidate but for electors, respected members of the community whose judgment they trusted; those people would decide the president.

But while we still technically select electors, it is merely a technicality. We don’t even know who these people are; they are selected purely as surrogates for the presidential candidate they have pledged to support. We aren’t giving them license to use their own judgment, which is an essential component to a republican system. Nor does this system do anything to advance representative democracy in the actual governing of our nation.

And while the Electoral College is indeed based on a federal idea — giving each state two votes for president, in addition to giving the population of each state a proportional vote — no one could rationally argue that the government in Washington acts like a federal government, which confines itself to those matters states are incapable of handling, rather than a national government. Democrats largely disdain the idea, and for all their 10th Amendment bluster, Republicans have made it clear that they have no intention of matching deeds to words. Look no further than No Child Left Behind.

So if the Electoral College doesn’t advance either of the philosophical goals that adherents say it was designed to advance (and there is reason to believe the actual goal was much more pedestrian and political), what does it achieve?

It gives an inordinate say to voters who happen to live in states that are closely divided. Now, people who find themselves in such circumstances might well have greater collective wisdom than those of us who live in states dominated by one political viewpoint, simply because they are more likely to have their assumptions challenged. But that hardly seems like justification. If it were, then why not just pick out the most reasonable million people in the nation and let them select the president?

In more practical terms, the Electoral College has the great potential to do to others what it has done to me: teach them that their preference for president makes no difference. When that happens, one of two things will occur: Voter participation will plummet, or else those who come out on the losing side of elections will be convinced that their government is illegitimate. Neither is an acceptable outcome in a system of self-governance.

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