The presidential election of 2000 taught the country a civics lesson that some Democrats are still smarting over. Now, four years after Republican President Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore but took the White House with more electoral votes, tracking the Electoral College has become a key part in this year’s presidential election coverage and has regular people expounding on swing states and electors. Dozens of Web sites devoted to demystifying the Electoral College have cropped up on the Internet, offering electoral map predictions based on state polls released almost daily. Many news organizations have made mapping electoral votes a key part of their campaign coverage. Some organization even offer Internet users the chance to manipulate the information to play out scenarios for a win by George W. Bush or Sen. John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat. All the education must have paid off. Five out of six people surveyed Tuesday by Trib p.m. knew what the Electoral College was and how it worked. “I think the previous election brought it home,” said Karen Larson of Swissvale. “It got everyone stirred up. It stirred me up.” “The sense I get is that the Electoral College is certainly more front and center this year, and, yes, I would attribute the increased attention to 2000,” said Scott Elliott, a Raleigh, N.C. man who operates the right-leaning www.electionprojection.com. Elliott’s site has averaged about 67,000 hits a day, but this week the number of hits jumped to more than 100,000. Chris Bonneau, an assistant political science professor at the University of Pittsburgh, said he has noticed more attention being paid to state polls and dynamics than before. “Given that what happened in 2000 hadn’t happened in anyone’s lifetime — where someone got fewer votes than their opponent and still won the presidency, this year we’re seeing a lot of state by state polls,” he said. Even the oddsmakers in Las Vegas are getting in on the action, offering up the odds on the Nov. 2 will be a repeat of the 2000 election, with one candidate taking the popular vote and another taking the electoral vote. Benjamin Eckstein, president of America’s Line, said it is illegal to bet on the presidential election in the United States. Still, his company has set odds on which candidate will win and whether he will take both the popular and the electoral vote. America’s Line, based in Las Vegas, develops odds for a syndicated column. Their odds-on favorite is President Bush to win both the popular and the electoral vote. Their odds for Bush to take the popular vote and Kerry to take the electoral vote are 8 to 1, while Kerry’s odds of taking the popular vote and losing the electoral vote are 20 to 1. While the election is important, “it’s nice that people can see the lighter side as well,” Eckstein said. What is the Electoral College? Americans don’t vote directly for a presidential candidate, they vote for a slate of electors that represent that candidate’s party. There are 538 electors spread over 50 states and Washington, D.C., based on the number of representatives in the U.S. House and Senate. The slate of electors that receives the most votes in the general election meets about six weeks afterward to vote for their candidates to which they are pledged. Why do we do it that way? The Founding Fathers were a wary bunch. They were leery of too much of a direct democracy. And with 4 million people spread across 13 states and no real way to communicate with one another, they were concerned that people would simply vote for the “favorite son” from their state or region. At worst, that meant no candidate would get a clear majority of votes. At best, it meant that candidates would almost always be decided by larger, more populous states. They devised the Electoral College as a way to level the playing field. Source: Federal Election Commission Additional Information:

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A few Electoral College sites electoral-vote.com electionprojection.com presidentelect.org slate.com latimes.com

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