WASHINGTON - The Electoral College has been called an accident waiting to happen, because it can produce, as it has in three presidential elections, a winner who is not the popular choice of American voters.
It might have happened a fourth time, on Tuesday, when Vice President Al Gore won a narrow majority of the popular vote over Gov. George W. Bush of Texas but faces the possibility of losing the electoral vote because of a razor-thin decision apparently favoring Bush in Florida.
The system of using the popular vote in each state to award "electors" to the winning candidate - who, in turn, cast the state's electoral votes in an Electoral College that never meets - is an outgrowth of the Founding Fathers' dispute over the influence of larger and smaller states.
The founders compromised in creating the Electoral College. It gives each state the same number of electors as it has members in the House of Representatives and Senate combined - now a total of 535, plus three for the District of Columbia. A majority - 270 - is required for election. If no one achieved a majority, the election would go to the House, with each state having one vote, to decide the outcome.
The founders had debated whether the national legislature or "the people" should pick the president. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts warned that "the people are uninformed and would be misled by a few designing men." George Mason of Virginia added that "it would be as unnatural to refer the choice of a proper magistrate to the people as it would to refer a trial of colors to a blind man."
A compromise was struck, with state-appointed state electors, none of whom could hold public office, serving in the framework of an Electoral College.
It turned out to be less a college and more a correspondence school. The electors met in their own states after the election to cast their votes, with the sealed results forwarded to the president of the Senate for counting and certification before members of both houses of Congress.
The system worked smoothly in the first election, of George Washington, because he was a unanimous choice. At first, each elector named two presidential preferences, with the one getting the most votes becoming president and the runner-up vice president. But a tie electoral vote in 1800 between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr threw the decision to the House, which after much acrimony chose Jefferson. The process of "double balloting" was subsequently scrapped, with the president and vice president thereafter chosen separately.
