We cannot shake the notion that the candidate who gets the most votes should be president.

Unfortunately, that's not the system bequeathed by the founders, who developed instead a contraption that was imperfect at the outset and has grown more obsolete with each decade. Now, on the eve of what may be another eyelash election, one of the world's sophisticated democracies will employ an 18th-century artifact to select a president.

The supreme irony of the Electoral College is that the jalopy cannot be fixed. Reversing its precepts -- exaggerated power for small states and winner-take-all voting -- would require too many in Congress and state legislatures to vote against their own interests. Still, the system's flaws are worth pointing out.

Start with some sympathy for the founders. In 1787, theirs was less a united nation than a patchwork of far-flung villages. News took weeks to travel from Boston to Charleston. Few politicians were nationally known. The masses were not to be fully trusted, despite the lofty rhetoric of the founding documents.

As the system evolved, a president would come not from the people but from the states, or, more precisely, from electors who represented a candidate's supporters within the states. In a compromise that Alexander Hamilton called "least excellent," interests would be balanced among big states, small states and slave states, which were allowed, for representational purposes, to count a slave as three-fifths of a person. Each state would get electoral votes equal to its representation in Congress.

But because each state, no matter its size, had two senators, small states gained an advantage, to the point that now an electoral vote from Wyoming represents 167,000 people while an electoral vote in California represents 645,000 -- a clear distortion of the one person, one vote principle. In addition, as the number of states grew, it became ever more apparent that by massing their votes in a winner-take-all sweepstakes, states would gain extra leverage.

That's how the system's great flaw emerges. Because of extra weight to small states and because a candidate could narrowly lose a state and get no credit for the votes he won, it's entirely possible for a candidate to win the national popular vote, even by a wide margin, and still lose the election if his opponent wins narrowly in the right combination of states.

Given the math, it's fortunate that only four times has a candidate won the national popular vote but lost the presidency. Four years ago, Al Gore got 540,000 more votes than George W. Bush, but lost when the Supreme Court allowed Florida officials to sort out voting irregularities and decide the outcome. Given the nature of this year's race, something similar could happen.

Even if it doesn't, the nation deserves a fairer, more direct method of selecting a president. Many democracies around the world have copied the American system; none has copied the Electoral College.

The central questions are these: Why should a presidential election be held to a lower democratic standard than all others? Why should a presidential election not adhere to the principle of one person, one vote?

We can think of no good enough reason to retain this antique. The course of American history has moved toward greater fairness, gradually allowing the votes of the unpropertied, blacks, women, the poor and 18-year-olds. The penalty, however, for living in a large state has not been removed, nor has the disenfranchising effect of voting for a candidate who loses your state.

Consider this: Republican voters in Kansas helped to elect President Bush in 2000, but Republican voters in Minnesota did not. Their votes were irrelevant because their state went for Gore. In that sense, a winning president is beholden to a rather narrow slice of the electorate -- people who supported him in the states he won.

Many principled arguments are made for keeping the Electoral College, including a fear that narrow factions would replace parties. But no argument, in our judgment, can overcome the contraption's basic unfairness. The faction problem could be handled through instant runoff voting, for example, where voters would list their first and second preferences for president.

A few states have tried to mend the system by proposing to apportion their electoral votes based on the popular vote. That's a noble effort, but one that would take a constitutional amendment to apply nationwide. Facing that difficult task, why not go for direct national election of the president?