DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- ''God is good,'' said Representative Corinne Brown from the pulpit on Sunday, and no one should deny it, but someone should talk to Him about the stupid Electoral College.
Brown's was an appropriate comment at Greater Friendship Baptist, just down the road from the famous speedway but also the Southern foundation of one of the more competitive House races in the country.
The Republican Party has found a novice pol, an African-American woman, to run against lifelong activist and Democrat Brown, already one of the most prominent of the African-American women in Congress. The churches were buzzing about the race on Sunday; in fact the entire district from Jacksonville south along the Atlantic coast is buzzing.
And there's the hitch. Turnout in Florida's third congressional district is expected to be very heavy next month, weighted significantly with engaged African-American voters. Their numbers should hold down the margin that statewide Republican candidates normally get from the northeastern counties, and that is therefore going to hold down George W. Bush's margin over Al Gore.
That is one reason that Florida's 25 Electoral College votes remain in play this late in the campaign, against all logic. There isn't a wise guy in the state who doesn't expect Bush to eke out a win here, but there isn't one who can say definitively that the tide has turned yet.
So in addition to being simply good, God has also been good to Florida this year. A state that traditionally has gotten nearly all of its attention in the primaries is getting a full dose of national exposure for its intriguing diversity and problems, and millions of TV and travel dollars, in the general election as well.
Whether this is good for our weird electoral system is another question, however.
Think about it. Bush could lose this place by a few thousand votes, probably losing any shot at the required 270 electoral votes in the process. But he could still be far ahead of Gore elsewhere in the South and in the states just east and west of the Rockies, and miles ahead of him in giant Texas.
In short, at least on paper, Bush could get more popular votes than Gore in the election but still lose the White House. It's more farfetched, but there's a plausible scenario for the opposite. Imagine Gore catching some late momentum up north, building major margins in California, the Northwest, and the Northeast, but just splitting the battleground Midwest while getting crunched in Dixie and the plains and Rockies. Bush gets his 270; Gore gets more votes.
And while we're at it, if you play with the electoral numbers, you could actually construct a nightmare scenario where Bush and Gore each get 269 electoral votes, and the election then gets tossed into the House, where each state delegation would cast one vote, no matter its size. Add the ingredient that the loser got more votes and the tie was produced by the two places that allow electoral vote distributions within a state (Nebraska and Maine), and the picture would be absurdly complete.
No one trustworthy puts the odds of the first scenario at better than 100-1, the second is at least a 250-1 longshot, and the nightmare is 500-1, but it's the mere possibility in a competitive campaign that ought to scare the pols into finally junking an archaic, antidemocratic system and letting the people pick the president. The odds: zilch; it will actually take a nightmare to prompt change.
For the record, our last minority president was Indiana's Benjamin Harrison over Grover Cleveland 110 years ago; the last one to go to the House produced a minority president in Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio over Samuel Tilden 124 years ago. Both elections were a function of post-Reconstruction politics. And there were just two more botched elections. The first was the Electoral College tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr in 1800 that led to our current system of tickets with running mates. The other was the multicandidate farce that produced a tarnished John Quincy Adams in 1824.
Modern America would go nuts if it happened again. Our system may be federalist, but our self-concept is more unitary today. The status quo merits contempt.
In fact, it already hurts. Because of it, half the country has no presidential campaign and the other half probably thinks it has too much of one. For every battleground, here or Michigan, there's a wasteland - Texas, New York, and New Jersey. It's one reason the campaign has ignored agriculture and rural America.
How much better if every vote really counted, if the fight everywhere were like the fight here. Maybe there'd be less money for TV and more for organizing. But at least there would be no more chance, like there is today, that a presidential election could be both legal and illegitimate.
Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is t-oliphant@globe.com.
