On Dec. 18, the members of the Electoral College will assemble in each of their state capitals - hopefully including Tallahassee - exchange a few pleasantries, cast their ballots, and adjourn. The only deliberating they do might take place over a good repast whereby they can relive the exciting events of our week past and that we are about to experience in the days ahead.
Some of these encounters will be celebrations, others more like wakes, but all will take place among like-minded citizens, because in every state, each elector will come from the same party. Republican and Democratic electors will never meet, much less debate the comparative merits of their respective champions.
Or so it has been in the past. This year, however, we can wonder whether some conscience-stricken electors might seize a measure of initiative. Perhaps a Republican in Ohio, doubting whether the runner-up in the popular vote should really become president, will cast a vote for Vice President Al Gore. Or perhaps a Democrat in Connecticut, disturbed over his party's pursuit of legal challenges to the results in Florida, will give his vote to Governor George W. Bush.
Only a week ago, there was speculation whether Bush might somehow appeal to electors' sense of conscience in case his rival managed to gain an electoral majority while trailing in the popular vote. Now that scenario has been reversed. Should Gore consider a similar appeal in case the Florida situation remains in Bush's favor?
There have been oddball electors in the past, but it has never mattered in the way it might this year. Electors in 26 states are not legally bound to cast their votes as the popular election results dictate; and even where they are bound, the enforcement of such obligations might prove legally, even constitutionally, problematic.
As a constitutional matter, however, it is extremely difficult to argue that an elector from one state should properly consider developments elsewhere. The Constitution says nothing about the presidency requiring a national majority of voters. More important, it leaves the state legislatures completely free to determine how their electors are to be chosen. Since the 1820s, nearly every state has used the winner-take-all rule to cast its electoral votes, regardless of the divisions among its own citizens. If states take no account of their own political minorities, why should electors care about the outcomes in other states or the nation at large?
But wait! it might be objected: Did not the Framers of the Constitution conceive of the electors as a college of notables, better qualified than ordinary voters to make the crucial choice? And if so, should not the electors be morally free to make their decision on other criteria - in this case, a belief that denying election to the candidate with the largest share of the popular vote would violate fundamental democratic principles?
In fact, the argument that the Framers envisioned the electors as a college of wise men does not explain why this curious institution became part of the Constitution. To understand why the Framers foisted this institution upon us, we have to recognize that the presidency was the one issue that puzzled them most.
The source of that puzzle was simply that they had no precedents for a national executive constituted on republican principles. Monarchy would obviously not do, and Americans had already rejected the primitive form of Cabinet government that existed in 18th-century Britain as a source of corruption. In all the states except Massachusetts and New York, governors were weak figures who had little responsibility and less political influence. The Framers of the Constitution knew that they wanted to make the executive independent of legislative control, but they had little sense of how to achieve that goal.
The problem that preoccupied them was the one that still plagues us: What was the best method of selecting a republican executive. There were two obvious methods. The president could be elected by the people, or by Congress. Both ideas were fully discussed, and both were found wanting. Popular election was rejected because the Framers doubted that the citizens of a highly decentralized society like America would be able to make an informed choice; they would scatter their votes among a bunch of favorite sons, but never achieve an effective majority. Congressional election was far more practical, but it raised the specter of creating the very dependence on the legislature they were intent on averting.
The novel idea of electors became attractive only because the objections against these other far more obvious modes proved too strong. It was never the most attractive mode of election; only the least unsatisfactory.
Certainly the Framers of the Constitution never imagined that the electors would conduct any serious deliberations. Had that been the goal, they would have required the electors from all the states to meet in one place - probably not the capital, wherever it happened to be - and to keep at their business until a president was appointed. They could have acted, in other words, like that other famous electoral College of Cardinals that gathers periodically in the decayed seat of the great ancient empire of Rome to select a pope. But 18th-century American Protestants did not think well of the Church of Rome, and that was hardly an example they were likely to admire.
Few of the Framers actually thought the electoral vote would be decisive. They recognized that electors, too, would cast their votes for state or regional favorites, and they accordingly expected that the final choice would have to be placed in Congress. But the electors could at least prevent Congress from controlling the entire process. And an able incumbent with a record to stand on could probably gain reelection from the electors, ensuring his independence.
One other consideration shaped the Electoral College: It was consciously designed to replicate the political compromises that went into the creation of a bicameral Congress representing both the people and the states. The populous states got the advantage in promoting candidates, because electors were allocated on the basis of total representation in Congress. Through the ''three-fifths clause,'' the Southern states could count their slaves for purposes of this allocation. And the small states gained two points: the additional two electors awarded for statehood, and the rule providing that in cases where the Electoral College did not produce a majority, the final election would fall to the House of Representatives, voting by states.
These compromises made sense in terms of the politics of getting the Constitution drafted and ratified, but they did the country poor service in terms of anticipating the future. In fact, the Framers' doubts about the feasibility of popular election were almost immediately disproved. As early as the first contested election of 1796, two rival parties coalesced around John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Very quickly, too, the congressional caucus became the chief mechanism for nominating candidates, later to be supplanted by the political convention and the presidential primary.
The choice of electors became merely a means to partisan ends; by the Adams-Jefferson rematch of 1800, political leaders were busily manipulating the rules for their appointment to maximize the influence of their states and parties, most notably through the winner-take-all rule.
All of this suggests that, if we were starting over with the Constitution, the Electoral College is the first thing we would scrap, even without the evidence of this year's election to help us. The system has never really worked as it was meant to, because no coherent understanding of how it was meant to work has ever existed.
But until we find a way to replace it, we can hope this year's Electoral College members have a good time and a tasty repast when they meet next month, and then we can all thank the Framers for the pleasant memories we'll have of this strange election.
Jack Rakove, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, ''Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution,'' is the Coe Professor of History and American Studies, and a professor of political science, at Stanford University.
