N THIS WILD, still-unsettled election, one thing is certain: The Electoral College is a loser and should be voted out.
The indirect voting process, established by the Founding Fathers because they trusted neither the public nor Congress to elect a president, serves no purpose in the year 2000, other than to intensify frustration over the agonizing Florida recount.
Were there no Electoral College, there most likely would be no recount, because on election night Democratic candidate Al Gore had clearly, if narrowly, captured the popular vote to beat Republican George W. Bush.
But under the current outdated system, people vote for electors who then cast ballots for the president. The number of electoral votes a state has is equal to the number of its representatives and senators, and in most states the winner gets them all. So proportional realities will not be reflected in the awarding of Florida's crucial 25 electorial votes, with a 13-12 split, for example.
Electors made sense 200 years ago in a largely uneducated, rural society where an elite few knew what was happening. Today those electors are just middlemen, rubber-stamping a state's popular vote and maintaining a process that does not allow that vote to hold sway in the most important election in the land.
Usually Americans don't care because elections rarely come down to a hair. The last time it happened was in 1888 when Benjamin Harrison lost the popular vote but won the White House.
But now a system that had seemed merely quaint has ratcheted up to outrageous, and voters are, rightly, howling. They should keep howling and push Congress to start the drive for a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College - it requires a two-thirds majority in the House and Senate and approval by three-fourths of the states.
Massachusetts Representative William Delahunt plans to file legislation in the new Congress, and he joins a cadre of reformers who should not lose steam once the immediate crisis is resolved. The next one could be worse.
Opponents fear that small states will lose clout in a direct vote because candidates will focus on states with big populations or pitch campaigns nationally rather than locally.
But that's already happening. Candidates hit on ''battleground'' states - and Florida was one - vying for the electoral votes rather than the hearts of individual Americans.
Most every election in this country, from senator to sewer commissioner, is decided by a one-person, one-vote tally. That's the only fair way to do it, and the presidency deserves nothing less.
