The Electoral College is a weird mechanism for choosing the American president - as zany as a Marx Brothers movie, but not funny. To paraphrase a Groucho song, "Hello, I Must Be Going," it has outlived its original shaky rationale, and it's time for it to go.

The need for reform has seldom been more apparent than it is right now. In 2000, Al Gore, the Democrat, drew 500,000 more votes than Republican George W. Bush, but Bush won the presidency by a handful of electoral votes. Sadly, that outcome did not generate a sustained call for scrapping the Electoral College. Post-chad reform energy focused instead on technology. (To no avail: The accuracy of voting systems is still a vexing issue.)

Now we may face a new mess. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) could be the popular-vote winner and the electoral-vote loser. It's not as likely, but Bush could suffer the same fate. If the second scenario occurs, one Democrat and one Republican will have fallen victim to the Electoral College in consecutive elections. That could ignite a bipartisan zeal for reform.

A third scenario could also create havoc. In Colorado, a ballot initiative called Amendment 36 asks voters to change the way the state allocates its electoral votes, effective in this election. Instead of awarding all nine elec toral votes to the winner, it would divide them proportionally. If Bush got 51 percent, for example, he'd get five of Colorado's electoral votes, and Kerry would get four.

The Constitution lets the states decide how to divide up electoral votes. Early on, it became clear that winner-take-all gave states more clout than the proportional approach. So, all but two states now use winner-take-all. Maine and Nebraska have a proportional system, based on congressional districts, unlike the strictly proportional Colorado proposal.

In the short term, if Amendment 36 passes and the 2004 election hinges on a few electoral votes, Colorado could become the litigation capital of America.

In the long run, it could start a state- by-state movement. That's risky: What if California were to go proportional, for example, and Texas stayed winner-take-all? Going proportional, state by state, opens a Pandora's box: nightmare visions of too many elections deadlocked in the Electoral College and thrown into the House of Representatives for decision.

But the preferable route, amending the Constitution itself, is tough: The conventional wisdom is that small states, which get unduly large influence from this system, would be reluctant to ratify an amendment that abolishes it. A case can be made that the college also gives large states too much clout, but it's not clear that making that argument would persuade smaller states to go along.



Step 1 to a solution

So, how do we get out of this mess? First, we acknowledge the problem.

In Philadelphia in 1787, the framers had no real precedents for deciding how to elect a president. Some said Congress should make the choice, but that didn't fly. Others wanted direct popular election. That raised two problems: The Southern states, with a lot of slaves forbidden to vote, feared Northern states would dominate. The killer objection was that voters in a sprawling, decentralized nation couldn't know enough about nominees from other states to choose national leaders. So they'd always pick favorite sons.

That left the Electoral College. It gave each state two electoral votes, for its two senators, and as many electoral votes as it had members of the House, based on population, including the heinous formula that slaves counted as three fifths of a person. So slave states could benefit from their slaves without letting them vote. It was a nasty compromise that the framers accepted, to get the Constitution ratified.



Justifications have vanished

Slavery no longer exists, and mass communication lets people all over the country learn about candidates from other regions. So two prime reasons for the college have disappeared, and we are a very different country now.

In fact, like a lemon leaving the auto dealership, the college quickly became unworkable. The framers did not "distinguish adequately between electing the president and electing the vice-president" and had not foreseen a tie between the top two candidates, wrote Robert Dahl, a revered Yale scholar, in "How Democratic is the American Constitution?" Those flaws emerged in the messy election of 1800, which produced the presidency of Thomas Jefferson and led to the 12th Amendment.

The same election revealed another flaw: The framers had wrongly hoped the college "would serve as an independent body free of the supposed vices of popular election," Dahl wrote. "Party politics - partisan politics, if you will - had transformed the electors into party agents." In other words, the college has been shaky from the start.

So, why keep it? One argument is that without it, no one would pay attention to the states having only a few votes. Favoring small states was a concession to get the Constitution ratified, but it is now largely irrelevant. People vote their interests, not the size of their states. Besides, the very small states don't need an Electoral College. They still enjoy vast, undemocratic over-representation because they have two U.S. senators, just like the big states.

Another objection is that the college preserves the principle of federalism. But federalism isn't about national elections. It's about the division of duties between the states and the federal government. That balance depends on executive, legislative and judicial decisions, not on the method of election.

Finally, some fear that if a national popular vote brought about a close result, it would lead to a nightmare national recount. But a constitutional amendment adopting popular election could help overcome that problem with strong language setting high national standards for national elections. Besides, the risk of a recount is trivial compared with a key benefit of popular election: more voter participation.

One of the worst features of the Electoral College is disenfranchisement. In any state, large or small, blue or red, if one candidate is way ahead in the polls, there is little incentive for voters to turn out: A candidate can win the state by one vote or 1 million, and it won't matter at all in the other 49 Electoral College contests around the nation.

This page has always deplored low voter turnouts. Making every vote count equally, as the college does not, but as a national popular election would do, is crucial to achieve higher turnouts.

People in New York would not have to get on buses and travel to swing states such as Pennsylvania in order to volunteer and have a real impact on the election, as many are doing this year. If every vote in every state counts, people can get involved in their own neighborhoods, knowing that a vote in New York is as crucial as one in Philadelphia.



National voting = national cohesion

With a truly national election, candidates could focus on truly national issues, instead of getting bogged down in tiny, state-by-state concerns. And a real national election could erase forever the divisive blue-state, red-state map and mentality. That might actually help the nation work toward real unity.

Whatever the details of a constitutional amendment creating a popular election - and we hope it will include some form of runoff, so every president is elected by a majority, not just a plurality - it's time to remove the Groucho factor, reverse the framers' error and close the Electoral College. A great nation deserves a voting system that counts every vote the same.