In the midst of the current political mayhem, many Americans are demanding the death of the Electoral College.

While at first glance, eliminating the Electoral College seems logical, a closer look at some pros and cons reveals that dissolving the Electoral College would be a mistake.

Although the Electoral College does not serve the nation exactly as the authors of the Constitution intended in 1787, it remains important for a fair election process.

Originally, the framers of the Constitution created the Electoral College because they did not want a direct vote by the general public. They believed the people were not informed enough about the candidates running for office to make an educated vote.

The framers? intent was that the electors, chosen by state legislatures or by popular vote, would be knowledgeable people in each state who would investigate each candidate and vote based on their educated decision.

Each state is granted a number of electoral votes according to its population and the number of its senators, which is always two.

For example, Washington has 11 electoral votes, because it has nine members of the House and two senators. California has the most electoral votes, with 54. No state gets fewer than three electoral votes.

With 100 senators and 435 representatives in the United States, the total Electoral College vote is 538 (the District of Columbia also has three votes). A candidate must get 270 electoral votes to win the presidency.

States are free to decide how their electoral votes will be divided among the candidates. Almost all states have decided the candidate who wins the most popular votes will get all the state?s electoral votes.

Some basic arguments exist in the Electoral College?s favor.

First, the Electoral College system gives the people more voting power, not less.

In an article in Discover magazine, physicist Alan Natapoff, who has studied the Electoral College since 1970, said individual voting power almost always is higher when funneled through districts ? such as states ? than when pooled in one large, direct election.

In other words, it is more likely that a person?s one vote will determine the outcome in a state and a state then will turn the outcome of the Electoral College, than that a vote will turn the outcome of a direct national election.

Therefore, Natapoff found, voters have more power under the current electoral system.

A second benefit of the college is that it fosters a two-party system and discourages the formation of splinter parties. The idea of the winner-take-all system is that minor parties get few electoral votes and a president who is the choice of the nation as a whole is elected.

Suppose we eliminated the college and elected a president by direct popular vote. Voters would have any number of candidates to have to choose from, which would mean no candidate would receive a popular-vote majority. This would be a problem when the elected candidate took office, because he or she would have the support of only a small fraction of the nation.

Marcia Godwin, who teaches Parties, Campaigns and Elections in the political science department at Western, said one of the biggest arguments for the Electoral College is that it gives smaller states a voice. If the country elected a president by direct popular vote, candidates would ignore states with smaller populations, such as Washington and Montana.

Instead of paying attention to local interest and issues in some of the smaller states, candidates might instead focus more energy on California and New York and spend more money on expensive national media campaigns.

On the other end of the spectrum, Electoral College opponents argue the system doesn?t fairly represent the population.

The historical 2000 presidential election has highlighted the most obvious argument against the Electoral College: the system has the potential to contradict popular will. This is a rare event (the last time it happened was 1888) and does not validate the destruction of the Electoral College, because the college?s benefits far outweigh its disadvantages.

The system as it stands empowers each voter, promotes a simple, two-party system and provides equity among states.

Without the Electoral College, each vote cast by the public will lose power, multiple parties will clog the ballots and presidential candidates will turn to the media as their primary means of campaigning. As the Bush-Gore election of 2000 has made obvious, the Electoral College system is not foolproof, but elimination is not the answer.