Is it time to scrap the Electoral College?

Recounts would have been required in every state. "If we had had direct, non-federal election in 2000, every ballot box in the country could have been re-opened and there could have been court challenges in every state," she said.

"The process would have gone on so long that on Inauguration Day the speaker of the House would have had to have been sworn in as acting president. An acting president would have been a real calamity."

A margin of one-half of one percent
The difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush in 2000 was 540,000 votes out of more than 105 million total votes cast, a victory margin of only one-half of one percent.

With such a slim margin, there’d be every incentive for both the loser and winner to seek recounts so as to get more votes in the states that each one won by a large margin. Another 50,000 votes for Bush in Utah, Georgia and Texas, for example, could have helped him erase the tiny popular vote edge that Gore had.

At the MIT conference, Yale University law professor Akhil Amar dismissed the dire nationwide recount scenario as an exaggerated fear.

Not even the most populous states pick their governors through an Electoral College system, Amar pointed out. If the popular vote is good enough to elect a governor in a state of 8.5 million voters, such as California, then it would work in a national electorate of 120 million voters.

Amar said a direct national election would create healthy incentives for states to compete with each other in getting more of their people to vote — for example by allowing voter registration on Election Day and by mandating that Election Day be a day off, with pay, for all workers.

He even suggested that states might pay people for voting, just as people are paid for jury duty.

But he added, "you do have direct national elections, states will have an incentive to over-compete. One state will say, ‘We’ll let 17-year olds vote,’ and another state will say, ‘We’ll let 16-year olds vote.’ You’ll need to have some federal oversight, which is a good thing, actually."

"Is it really fair if one state lets you to vote for three months, and another only for three hours? These are real issues," Amar said, but "in the end they don’t scare me away."

What would rogue electors do?
While Democrats bitterly recall that in 2000, Gore lost the electoral vote even though he won the popular vote, Bennett said, "There are much more serious problems with the Electoral College than the fact that we might elect a president who didn’t win the nationwide popular vote."

Among the "landmines" Bennett cited: electors who break their pledge to vote for their party’s nominee. Such "faithless electors" could throw the election to the opposing candidate.

A total of 11 electors out of the 21,000 in the nation’s history have voted for someone other than the person to whom they were pledged, but "faithless electors" have never had any effect on the outcome of an election.

If Democratic candidate Barack Obama were to win on Election Day, it might erase the Democrats’ unpleasant memories of 2000 and lessen the momentum for scrapping the Electoral College.

In a best-case scenario for Obama, Democrats would be able to boast that he won 380 electoral votes — a victory the size of Bill Clinton’s in 1996.

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