Bob Schieffer, moderator: "President Bush, in the 2000 election half a million more Americans voted for your opponent than for you, yet you won the presidency. You have not been hesitant in suggesting that the U.S. Constitution be amended to outlaw gay marriage. Would you also support a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College and have the winner of the presidential election be determined by popular vote?"

WASHINGTON -- It was the best question not asked at the presidential debates. But two constitutional experts with differing views about the Electoral College agree that the question will be asked on Nov. 3 and thereafter if this year's presidential election produces another "inversion" of the popular and electoral votes.

		Michael McGough is an editor at large in the PG's National Bureau (mmcgough@ nationalpress.com).

At a gentlemanly debate last week sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, Akhil Reed Amar of the Yale Law School, a critic of the Electoral College, and the AEI's Walter Berns, a defender of the present system, agreed that advocates of abolition would be energized by another split verdict --- though neither thought that abolishing the Electoral College would be a "slam dunk," as former CIA Director George Tenet might say.

Still, if constitutional lightning struck twice, the possibility of a stampede would increase. The perfect storm for change would be a different sort of inversion from the 2000 result: an outcome in which John Kerry won the electoral vote and George Bush the popular vote, a possibility rich in poetic justice. In that event, both parties would have burned once by the Electoral College, and both would have been denied the opportunity to go into Michael Moore mode and assail the other party's Electoral College victor as an illegitimate president. (There go the "Re-Defeat Bush" bumper stickers.)

The debate over the Electoral College, once confined to political science seminars and high school debate tournaments, periodically surfaces in the larger body politic, usually because of a third-party challengers like George Wallace, John Anderson or Ross Perot.

It was Anderson's candidacy that impelled the American Enterprise Institute to publish the first edition of a handy little primer on the Electoral College titled "After the People Vote." Last week's panel discussion with Berns and Akhil Amar -- assisted from the wings by his law professor brother Vikram David Amar -- doubled as a book party for the third edition of "After the People Vote."

As in the book, Berns defended the Electoral College system by suggesting that critics focus on "output" rather than "input" -- that is, "what system is more likely to produce a president who holds this great office?" Berns says that "in all years I have been engaged with this issue, I have yet to encounter a critic of the Electoral College who argues that a president chosen directly by the people is likely to be a better president."

Berns also believes that the Electoral College "protects the interests of states as states." But his most provocative argument -- because it is open to the charge of elitism -- comes in a rhetorical question he plaintively asks in his contribution to the AEI book: "Have we really reached the point where the right to hold an office depends solely on the suffrage of a popular majority?"

To which the Amars basically reply: "Yeah, we have."

Democracy isn't the only card the Amars have to play in attacking the Electoral College. First they score a neat (if irrelevant) debating point by arguing that the Electoral College is rooted in a scheme to empower slaveholding states, Then they take on Berns' arguments about small states and federalism.

But democracy is their main concern. They argue that the primary reason the framers delegated the selection of the president to the Electoral College was not a generalized suspicion of direct democracy but a fear that "ordinary Americans across a vast continent would lack sufficient information to choose intelligently among leading presidential candidates."

That isn't true today, they argue, though whether TV attack ads qualify as "sufficient information" is another question. Therefore why not ditch the College, which is not even the last word under the status quo? If there is a deadlock in the College, the president is chosen by the House of Representatives.

Even Berns acknowledged that abolition of the Electoral College could be defended as the culmination of a trend toward democracy that already has introduced the direct election of senators, women's suffrage, the 18-year-old vote and the 23rd Amendment, which undermined the state's-rights rationale of the Electoral College by giving three electoral votes to a non-state -- my new home, the District of Columbia.

Small states may resist, but a second "inversion" in a row might lead to a bipartisan rush toward abolition in Congress and the three-quarters of the states required for ratification of a constitutional amendment. Does that mean a happy ending for voters who have complained about being disenfranchised by the archaic Electoral College system? Not necessarily. Electing the president by a winner-take-all popular vote (with or without a runoff if no candidate received a majority) would eliminate the possibility of an "inversion," but it wouldn't be an unambiguous triumph for democracy and maximum political participation.

Americans are accustomed to equating "winner take all" with "democracy"; that explains the griping by Al Gore voters who complained that the "inversion" of 2000 robbed their votes of significance. But even under that view, their votes, and their interests, count only if they are part of a plurality. "Winner take all" can be translated as "Loser gets nothing."

Other nations have what they think is a better idea: some form of proportional representation in which even the minority receives some bang for its electoral buck (or euro) in what may be a coalition government.

Looking at Israel, with its plethora of parties, Americans might have reason to consider our system superior, but it isn't because it's more democratic. It isn't, and it won't be even if the Electoral College is abolished.