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Preface The facts of the matter are that the system of [direct election] will greatly increase the likelihood of a minority president. . . . [It] would break down the federal system under which most states entered the union, which provides a system of checks and balances to insure that no area or group shall obtain too much power. —Senator John F. Kennedy1 This government is not completely consolidated, nor is it entirely Federal. . . . Who are the parties to it? The people—not the people as comprising one great body, but the people as composing 13 sovereignties. —James Madison2 I first became interested in the Electoral College as a high school student at St. Albans School in Washington, D.C. Every Thursday evening we would meet in government class in which students would engage in mock congressional debate on an issue of national interest, proposing bills, arguing for or against them, and then voting. One of the bills proposed was to “abolish the Electoral College.” I remember well one classmate of mine in that class by the name of Al Gore. Of course, none of us at that time knew the enormity that this issue would play in the future career of our classmate when he became a candidate for president in the 2000 election. This government class debate was in large part a reenactment of a real- life debate held just a few years before in the U.S. Senate in March 1956. As documented in the Congressional Record,3 a cadre of U.S. senators, led in part by Republican senator Everett Dirksen, had taken it upon them- selves to initiate demands that since 1789 have now become a bidecade