All that changed on election night, November 7. Early on, it looked as though Vice President Gore would win the electoral vote while losing the popular vote. When questioned about this possibility, Gore said the Constitution — which provides for the appointment of the president by electors from each state, not a popular vote — must be respected. A president-elect who did not win the popular vote, Gore contended, should not have his governance called into question.

Gore, I suspect, now regrets that answer. As I write, the election is still too close to call; but if the Florida recount confirms the original numbers, the reverse will come to pass: George W. Bush will carry the Electoral College despite Al Gore’s razor-thin victory in the popular vote.

This morning, one of my fiancée’s professors told his class that, whoever is elected, the next president should move to abolish the Electoral College. America is a democracy, he reasoned, and thus the president should be chosen by nationwide popular vote, disregarding state boundaries. The Electoral College hijacks democracy, he concluded, and must be scrapped.

The Framers of our Constitution were not stupid. They created the Electoral College for a reason, and this year’s election — far from discrediting the electoral system — demonstrates its genius.

Writing to promote the freshly-drafted Constitution in 1787, Alexander Hamilton explained the Electoral College. "The people of each State," he wrote in The Federalist Number 68, "shall choose a number of persons as electors, equal to the number of senators and representatives of such State in the national government who shall assemble within the State, and vote for some fit person as President."

That the power of electing the president was given to the states, not the people as a whole, was crucial for ratifying the Constitution. In the early republic, the sovereign states were not about to cede their authority to a distant, centralized government that had only its own interests — not those of the individual states — in mind.

That’s also why we have a Senate, not just a House of Representatives. Each state’s representation in the House is determined by its population, but every state, however large or small, has two senators. The Founders intended the Senate to balance the House and protect the interests of the states. Because each state has as many members of the Electoral College as it has representatives and senators together, lower-population states are given a greater say in the electoral process than they would have in a popular vote.

In short, the Electoral College protects the interests of the states against the power of the federal government. How did this play out in Election 2000?

Looking at an electoral map, with George Bush’s states in red and Al Gore’s in blue, the bulk of the U.S. is red. According to USA Today, Bush won in 2,434 counties nationwide, while Gore prevailed in only 677. When you calculate that in terms of square miles, Bush carried 2,427,039 square miles of America, while Gore claimed only 580, 134. "Big city voters handed Gore a 71% to 25% landslide," reports USA Today’s Jill Lawrence, "while six in ten rural and small-town voters backed Bush."

For example, Gore carried Michigan with 51 percent of the popular vote. Though he did poorly in most counties — Michigan's small towns and farming country — he took the state by capturing Detroit with an overwhelming 94 percent (though some allege that number was inflated by voter fraud). In Illinois, Gore garnered 80 percent of the Chicago vote but only 54 percent of the statewide vote. He scored 80 percent in New York City (60 percent overall) and 73 percent in Los Angeles (54 percent).

If the presidential election were purely a popular vote, with no regard for individual states, it would be dominated by a handful of big cities. As seen above, states like Michigan and Illinois can be swayed by a single metropolitan area. Candidates in those states must bend to the interests of the cities in order to win.

With no Electoral College, presidential candidates would simply jet back and forth between the coasts, with the occasional stop in a large Midwestern city. With no Electoral College, candidates would have little choice but to bypass rural voters. Moreover, with no Electoral College, any other strategy would be politically foolish.

What's the difference between country folk and city folk, anyhow? Why should it matter that the cities sway elections, so long as democracy prevails? While it is certainly not possible to judge someone’s character based on where they live, one’s living situation does influence one’s responsibilities and interests, and thus affects one’s vote. "Cities are by nature more liberal than suburban and rural areas" Lawrence writes in USA Today, "... because they are denser and people rely more on public services and regulation such as zoning. ‘You have a different attitude toward politics,’ [urban expert Fred Siegal] says. ‘You can do less on your own. You need more from government.’" This helps to explain why city-dwellers voted for Al Gore in droves, with an eye toward increasing the scope and power of the federal government.

Putting aside the differences between urban and rural voters, another factor in a popular vote would be the notorious corruption that taints elections in large cities, and the power of organized labor and political "machines" to manipulate the vote in population-dense areas. At the polling place next to my Chicago office, for example, a large, intimidating man (a city official, actually) in a black trench coat stood outside all day handing voters slips of paper listing the candidates (all Democrats) they should vote for. It was amazing to see the machine at work!

Clearly, a nationwide popular vote, heavily weighted towards a few densely populated urban centers, would not necessarily reflect America as a whole. Far from subverting the American people, the Electoral College is one way of ensuring that America’s rural and heartland voters — those who live on and cultivate most of the actual land in the U.S. — are not entirely ignored.

Such is the wisdom of our Constitution’s electoral system.