Column: Remember Election 2000

As George W. Bush gave his State of the Union address last Tuesday amid plummeting approval ratings, I found myself thinking that among political pundits, the election debacle of 2000 seems to have been all but forgotten. Granted, many of us who had to suffer through interminable government class discussions of judicial review and obscure Florida laws might be glad to see it go. But even as Al Gore removes himself from the spotlight once again, I think it would be a disastrous mistake to leave in place the flawed system that cost him the presidency.

Let me be clear: I am not simply a sore loser. I despised the fundamental unfairness of the electoral college long before Election 2000. I don't even particularly like Gore. But the undue influence given to the smallest states caused the will of the American people to be overruled by a single Supreme Court vote and that is absolutely unjustifiable.

Some believe the electoral college is the best system available. "It's worked so far," proponents say. "Don't fix what isn't broken." Why don't we take a quick look at just how well the system works? I live in Virginia, a state with 13 electoral votes and about 7.2 million people - a ratio of more than 550,000 people per electoral vote. Contrast that with Wyoming, which has three electoral votes for under 500,000 people - just 167,000 people per electoral vote. All this time I thought it was "one man, one vote." In Wyoming, it's one man, three votes.

Defenders of the electoral college will say it's only fair- we're protecting the rights of the minority. Without the electoral college, the argument goes, these people would be ignored by presidential candidates. It's hard to believe that they can say this with a straight face, since people in these states are, in fact, ignored by presidential candidates. Of the states that have only the minimum three electoral votes, the smallest margin in 2000 was 10 points, a blowout by Gore in Vermont. Other small states, which are also supposed to gain more attention through the current system, saw even bigger blowouts - a 13-point win for Gore in Delaware, a 15-point win for bush in Montana and a 41-point dismantling of Gore in Wyoming. With margins like these, how can one believe that candidates will actually want to spend more time in these states?

Finally, as if I were not disadvantaged enough from having a vote that counts only one-third as much as another American's, the current winner-take-all system ensures that any vote for a Democrat in solidly Republican Virginia isn't counted at all. The same is true for Republicans in reliably Democratic states, and the millions of Americans who vote for third parties each year. In 2000, no matter which way the decision went, more than half of the votes in Florida would have been ignored.

What does it mean for these votes to be weighted? Why should we care? As we have seen, weighted votes affect the outcomes of presidential elections, but its effects are certainly not limited to that. I need only mention the name of Ted Stevens, the Senate Appropriations Committee chairman notorious for bringing home millions in pork spending to Alaska, to show how electoral weight given to small states can easily tip the balance unfairly in favor of a few million Americans.

You might be wondering, do you have anything better? I don't. If it were up to me, I would abolish or at least seriously restructure the states themselves. Does Rhode Island really need its own government? Barring that, however, there are a few ideas floating around that are at least worth a try, eliminating winner-take-all in presidential elections as the most promising. But until we stop talking about protecting the rights of an arbitrary minority and start talking about the equality of opportunity that this country was founded on, we are going to keep seeing disasters like the 2000 election. That is a fact those of us who value fairness cannot afford to forget.