The Electoral College is poised to award the presidency to a candidate who didn’t get as many votes from Americans as his challenger did, and Gore supporters are pointing out that such an outcome is not very fair.

That’s true; it’s not fair to Gore and it’s not fair to the American people. It’s as fair as we can make it, though, within the framework of the constitution, which is designed to make politics as fair as possible for American citizens.

The Electoral College was instituted for a number of very good reasons. News didn’t travel very fast in colonial America, and that reality argued for a more derivative form of government, in which electors gathered in a central forum could reasonably expected to have a better grasp of what was happening. Electoral votes were assigned to states on the basis of population, which meant that sparsely populated states could be represented even if their citizens couldn’t manage to cast their votes in a timely and informed manner.

Americans are arguing that information now travels at the speed of light and voters are able to make decisions based on conditions in effect at the very moment they step into the polls. In addition, votes can (at least in theory) be tabulated electronically, and within a few years we’ll undoubtedly be able to cast them electronically as well. Why, then, do we need the Electoral College?

Well, for a couple reasons. First of all, despite what George W. Bush says about the relative objectivity of electronic counts vs. human judgment (and he’s right, by the way), we’ll never be able to eliminate the human factor. In the case of punch-card ballots, someone has to calibrate the device that decides whether a punch "counts" or not. In the case of a recount, someone eventually has to call a halt. Without the Electoral College every ballot in the whole country might have to be recounted, because Colorado votes could counterbalance Florida votes. If, heaven forbid, that were ever to happen, some human judge would have to rule on the procedure to be followed, and then another judge would undoubtedly be called upon to rule on whether the procedure indeed had been followed.

No matter how the election was conducted, some elected official — a member either of the winning party or of one of the others — would eventually have to certify the outcome. Technological possibilities don’t necessarily translate into palatable options for Americans who want the political process conducted out in the light of day, where they can see it.

This week, the Electoral College is a popular scapegoat, but no one should make the mistake of believing that eliminating it would eliminate the human factor. It won’t; if that were possible, we wouldn’t actually need a president at all.