A dead man and a first lady elected to the Senate, concession calls made and then retracted, and a week later still no President-elect. The first presidential election most of us were able to take part in, it has been quite a tremendous and historic one. But for all the excitement, we are dangerously close to electing an illegitimate president. Because of the outdated electoral college, the entire race has come down to a few counties in southern Florida, most importantly Palm Beach County.

A statewide recount of Florida's ballots showed Bush ahead by less than 300 votes. Yet thousands of votes-the majority of which were intended for Gore-were accidentally cast for Pat Buchanan or disqualified. Both parties know that if the will of the people were properly expressed, Gore would have already been declared the winner.

The evidence that Gore was shortchanged is clear. The eye of the storm is a confusing ballot in Palm Beach County that staggered the names of presidential candidates on either side of the punch holes, a design illegal under Florida law. Gore's name was second on the list of candidates but his punch hole was third, because Buchanan's name was between Bush and Gore's names, but on the facing page. As a result, the strongly Democratic and Jewish county, which represents seven percent of Florida's population, cast a fifth of the votes Buchanan, a candidate often criticized for his anti-semitic views, won in the state, and over 19,000 ballots were disqualified for being double-punched. During the voting day, the supervisor of elections in Palm Beach even sent out an urgent memo to all poll workers, informing them of people's confusion over the ballots.

Questions about the accuracy of the votes are well founded. For somebody who ran on "trusting the people, not government," Bush has been awfully opposed to efforts to accurately determine Floridians' votes. Several citizens were scheduled to go to court on Tuesday to express their concern that their votes did not reflect their intent. In all of Florida's counties the number of registered Reform Party members was consistent with the number of votes Buchanan won except for in Palm Beach, where the number of votes is strikingly higher. Even Buchanan recognized that "many of these are probably not my votes," especially those that were otherwise straight Democratic tickets. In 1998, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that when "reasonable doubt exists as to whether a certain election expressed the will of the voters … the court is to void the contested election even in the absence of fraud or intentional wrongdoing."

Yet the Bush campaign is bitterly opposed to a judge even hearing the case. For all their cries against the involvement of courts, the Bush campaign was the first to directly go before one. Doubling their hypocrisy, they who professed more confidence in states than in "big government" went before a federal court to block the legal actions of a state. In a move that erased any grounds of fairness they claimed to stand on, Bush representatives asked a judge to not allow a manual recount of votes in counties with questionable results. The judge appropriately dismissed the request. A manual recount catches errors that machines cannot, and such a recount in one percent of Palm Beach County had already led to a net gain of 19 votes for Gore. There, the recount was conducted in full view of the press and a Republican and a Democrat judged each ballot. A manual count of machine-rejected ballots gave Bush his amazing 4-vote lead in New Mexico last weekend, and he himself signed a Texas law stating that a hand recount is preferable to an electronic count in a voting dispute. To oppose the most accurate count possible is tremendously ignoble on Bush's part.

It would be an even greater outrage if the Florida Secretary of State, a friend and active supporter of George W. and Florida governor Jeb Bush, were allowed by a court to cut short all Florida recounts and certify the election on Tuesday afternoon, as she says she must do. Speed should not take precedence over justice.

Here in Massachusetts, it was precisely such a recount that led Representative William Delahunt to win a race in which his opponent had previously been declared the victor. Ballots with holes only partially punched through were counted during a manual count and helped him overcome his opponent's narrow margin of victory. Incidentally, Delahunt says that when Congress reconvenes, he will propose legislation that would abolish the electoral college.

Such a move is entirely appropriate and overdue. New York Senator-elect Hillary Clinton will also make such a proposition her first act in the Senate. The electoral college is an outdated relic of the 18th century, wholly unsuitable for a country that claims to be the world's model democracy. Not only does it allow for a situation like the one we are seeing today, where the loser of the popular vote may win the presidency, but it also betrays the notion that every person deserves an equal vote.

Under the electoral college, votes coming from smaller states are unjustly overweighted. The number of electoral votes a state gets is the sum of representatives and senators it has, but senators are not distributed according to population. Therefore, the electoral votes in California are forced to represent the will of far more people than the electoral votes from, for example, Rhode Island. If electoral votes were truly distributed by population, Gore would be the uncontested winner by now.

Currently, a margin of about 300 votes in Florida could override the more than 260,000- vote margin of victory that Gore won nation-wide. Should Floridians' votes really be worth over 800 times more than votes cast elsewhere? It seems only natural that the candidate who wins the most votes should become our president. That is not the case under the electoral college, an institution created largely out of our founding fathers' distrust of direct popular rule. Until that system is changed, though, we must abide by it. Gore deserves Florida's electoral votes. If Bush is awarded them, we will have a president who is not only illegitimate because he lost the popular vote, but also, more importantly, because he did not deserve to win the electors' votes.

For all the chaos this election has caused, there is great potential for good to come of it. The electoral college should be abolished, as a majority of the American population believes it should be. Voting procedures should take advantage of modern technology. There should be a standard national ballot, perhaps using the ATM-like technology that a county in California experimented with this year. It allowed for multiple languages, big type, no uncertain votes and quick results. Using such machines would have prevented the disputes in Florida from arising in the first place.

We also saw other positive signs in this election, such as a very high turnout rate among African-Americans and a record number of women elected to the Senate. Many states (but not Massachusetts) voted to loosen their restrictions on marijuana and to recommend treatment rather than jail time for drug offenders. Republicans have maintained control of both the House and Senate, but their majority has become so razor-thin that mere lip service to bipartisanship will not be enough to achieve anything. Hopefully, this election will ultimately make us a better society. If we are a fair one, it will be led by President Gore.

Adam Nagorski '02 is a regular columnist for The Amherst Student.