Regardless of whether George W. Bush maintains his roughly 300 vote lead in Florida and assumes the presidency this January, last week's election will undoubtedly add fuel to the debate over the proper way to elect the chief executive of the United States. No matter who ultimately wins, it seems inevitable that a shocked American electorate will demand an end to the Electoral College system that many voters did not even know existed. On the surface it seems logical enough-the candidate who wins the popular vote should be the president; anything else is undemocratic. But the issue is not that simple-if it were, the Electoral College would have been torn down decades ago. It remains, and for the first time in over a hundred years, the Electoral College looks like it will overrule the popular vote. The reactionary consensus seems to be that a horrible injustice has occurred, but the national rush to judgment seems to be missing the point entirely.

When the framers wrote the Constitution more than two centuries ago, they were extremely concerned about the protection of minority rights and regional interests in a large national democracy. Though regional interests in the United States are not what they once were, the country is visibly divided along political lines. Further, deep concern about specific issues tends to be concentrated in certain areas of the country.

As campaigns become less and less issue-oriented and as candidates increasingly use generic television spots to espouse their brave positions-for education, against crime, for the common folk-the need to accumulate electoral votes tends to emphasize these regional differences and ignites issue debates that the candidates would otherwise avoid.

Throughout much of the United States, issues do not really matter. The favored candidate tends to be the one that makes suburban white America feel the best about itself. Real policy differences are at best avoided, and at worst denounced as destructive partisanship. But the Electoral College system forces candidates in a closely contested race to address the issues that matter to undecided voters in battleground states. In these states, a handful of voters-often those representing a small minority group-will decide the outcome of the election based on issues of concern to them.

In Iowa, for example, farmers represented the crucial swing voters that Gore eventually won over in order to capture the state. In Pennsylvania and Michigan, Gore was able to convey a strong pro-union message and rally support from socially conservative blue-collar workers. In Ohio and West Virginia, however, the Democrats failed to show any major differences between the two candidates, and Gore paid the price. And in Florida, where the election will be decided by the election could be decided by a swing of just 150 votes, the crucial minority proved to be senior citizens.

Under a popular election system, none of these groups, by themselves, would have had the power to sway the outcome in either direction. All campaigning would have been limited to vague generalities approved of by the majority of American voters. But under our current electoral system, minorities matter. Over the course of the campaign, Bush and Gore were forced to go beyond their usual pronouncements about tax cuts and education reform and to address controversial issues such as farm subsidies, the minimum wage, Medicare, and Social Security in order to appeal to these groups.

Opponents of the Electoral College, especially in the face of an imminent Gore defeat, claim that the results are neither democratic nor a legitimate reflection of the will of the people. Though Andrew Jackson, Samuel Tilden, and Grover Cleveland (and likely Gore, as well) have all won the popular vote and lost the election, none of these candidates won almost half of the popular vote. In a democracy, mere pluralities mean almost nothing-the fact is that a majority of the voters voted against Gore and there is no guarantee that he would prevail in a runoff. What we do know is that Bush was not only the choice of most of the states; he was also the narrow choice (assuming he wins in Florida) of a regional cross-section of the country. Gore lost the election not because of an archaic constitutional glitch, but because he neglected to campaign in and failed to appeal to the South, the agricultural Midwest, and the West.

The need to win varying demographics of undecided voters in crucial swing states forced both candidates to insert substantive positions into their campaigns. They were trying to attract the same voters and were forced to take stands that may have been unpopular elsewhere in the country. This is how democracy should work-the candidates take stands and make comprises in an effort to attract undecided voters while not alienating their bases. In the end, Bush's campaign proved better than Gore's-300 votes better.