To most of us the Electoral College is so inscrutable and immutable that we don't grasp how much it is also so undemocratic and inequitable. Now we have just seen it go through its antique antics again.

Under the chairmanship of Vice President Dick Cheney, a joint session of Congress met in the House of Representatives chamber on January 6 to formally dole out the 538 Electoral College votes of the 50 states and the District of Columbia—286 for President George W. Bush and 251 for Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. That was 15 more electoral votes for the winner than the 271 that made Bush the "accidental president" in 2000, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court's blockade of a recount of the popular vote in Florida.

When you think about it—and most of us usually don't—it all seems pretty obscure. So we asked for help from an expert: Professor George C. Edwards III, a leading scholar on the political inequities in our system and the author of the new book Why the Electoral College Is Bad for America.

One of the country's leading authorities on the U.S. presidency, Edwards has written dozens of articles and has written or edited 19 books on American politics and public policy-making. He has spoken at more than 150 universities and before other groups in the U.S. and abroad, keynoted numerous national and international conferences, and can often be heard on National Public Radio.

Edwards is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University at College Station, Texas. He also holds the Jordan Chair in Presidential Studies and has held visiting appointments at the University of London, Peking University, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the University of Wisconsin, and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. In 2005-06 he will hold the Olin Chair in American Politics at Oxford University. He was the founder of, and from 1991-2001 the director of, the Center for Presidential Studies.

Edwards has also applied his scholarship to practical issues of governing, including advising Brazil on its new Constitution, Russia on building a democratic national party system, and Chinese scholars on democracy.

t is difficult to imagine a definition of democracy that does not include equality in voting as a central standard for a democratic process. Because political equality is central to democratic government, we must evaluate any mechanism for selecting the president against it.

In 2000, the presidential candidate who received the most votes lost the election. In 2004, a switch of fewer than 60,000 votes in Ohio from George W. Bush to John Kerry would have elected Kerry, even though Bush would still have had a majority of the national vote and a margin of more than 3 million votes. The Electoral College is a capricious system favoring the votes of some citizens over others, depending solely upon the state in which they live.

All but two states award all their electoral votes to the plurality winner of the state. Nearly 3 million people voted for Al Gore for president in Florida in 2000. Because George W. Bush won 537 more statewide votes than Gore, however, he received all of Florida's electoral votes; the votes for Gore played no role in the national election.

In multiple-candidate contests (as in 1992, 1996 and 2000), this system may suppress the votes of the majority as well as the minority. In 2000, pluralities rather than majorities determined the allocation of electoral votes in nine states, including Florida. In each case, a minority of voters determined how all of their state's electoral votes would be cast.

A candidate thus can win some states by very narrow margins, lose other states by large margins, and win the electoral vote while losing the popular vote. The votes for candidates who do not finish first in a state election play no role in the outcome of the election, since they are not aggregated across states. The winner-take-all system takes the electoral votes allocated to a state based on its population and awards them all to the plurality winner of the state. In effect, the system gives the votes of the people who voted against the winner to the winner.