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Bush wins { December 19 2000 } Electors Reassert Their Role Bush Wins Vote Protest Costs Gore Charles BabingtonWashington Post Staff Writer December 19, 2000; Page A1 The electoral college, an 18th-century concoction that rarely attracts more than a footnote and yawn, reasserted its potency yesterday by electing George W. Bush as president even though Vice President Gore won a half-million more votes nationwide. The country's 538 electors gathered in the 50 state capitals and District of Columbia to cast their all-important ballots, acting as constitutional proxies for the more than 100 million Americans who voted on Nov. 7. They also sent a powerful reminder that, because of compromises made 210 years ago, a vote in some states is worth more than a vote in others. Gore lost one electoral vote yesterday to a protest against the District of Columbia's lack of statehood status. But the nation's other electors remained loyal, giving Bush his 271 votes, one more than the minimum needed to claim the White House. The last formality before Bush's inauguration is Congress's scheduled Jan. 6 certification of the electoral votes cast yesterday. Gore is the first candidate since Grover Cleveland in 1888 to win the most popular votes but lose the electoral college. A Washington Post analysis of the most recent state-by-state counts, including late-tallied absentee ballots, puts Gore's lead over Bush at 540,539 votes. Many news organizations, including The Post, had been using a smaller figure (about 337,000 votes) that failed to reflect recent updates. Already one of the Constitution's least understood and least popular provisions, the electoral college is coming under unusually heavy criticism because of Florida's bitter post-election battle and Bush's second-place finish in the popular vote. Maryland Gov. Parris N. Glendening yesterday called the system indefensible, and his comments were typical of several Democratic officials who said the electoral college has outlived its time. But legal and political experts say the system is almost certain to survive new challenges because it benefits numerous small states that have enough power to block a constitutional amendment. "The prospects are virtually nil" that the electoral college will be abolished, said Michael J. Glennon, a law professor at the University of California at Davis and author of a 1992 book on the electoral system. Before yesterday's votes, some Democrats had speculated that a couple of "faithless electors" for Bush might switch their votes to Gore and make him president-elect. Gore discouraged such talk, however, and the only noncomformist elector turned out to be one of his own, the District's Barbara Lett-Simmons. Gore was to have received the District's three ballots, but Lett-Simmons withheld her vote to highlight Washington's lack of voting members in Congress. "I have cast my ballot for the colonists in the District of Columbia," said Lett-Simmons, a longtime Democratic activist. "We live by the laws. We live by the rules. Our sons, brothers and cousins die in wars. . . . But we don't have the right to vote." She said she would have cast her vote for Gore if he had a chance to win. The Founding Fathers devised the electoral college as a compromise between one faction that wanted direct election of presidents and another that wanted Congress to select the chief executive. In a era of poor roads and slow communications, they worried that nationwide campaigns would prove difficult. They saw the electoral college as a way to nurture a two-party system with a winner-take-all format that thwarts third parties. They did all this in an era in which women, blacks and Native Americans were barred from voting, and this year's bitter presidential race has given new ammunition to critics who say the system should be junked. "As a practical matter to a lot of people, myself included, we find it a little bit distasteful that the person who won the popular vote is not elected president," Glendening said as he watched Maryland's electors cast their 10 votes for Gore in Annapolis. "It's agonizing and not really defensible." Under the electoral college system, the winner of a state's presidential contest claims all of that state's electoral votes (except in Maine and Nebraska, which have a more proportional system). Each state has electoral votes equaling its number of U.S. House members plus its two U.S. senators. This gives disproportionate power to small states, which can have no fewer than three electoral votes. It also rewards a nominee exactly the same whether he wins a state by one vote or by millions. Over the years, many critics have tried to abolish the system. That requires a constitutional amendment, which calls for approval by two-thirds of the House and the Senate, then ratification by three-fourths of the states. Too many small states benefit from the system to make its abolition feasible. The most that might happen, Glennon said, is that Congress could offer states enough incentives to persuade them to follow the example of Maine and Nebraska. In those states, one electoral vote goes to the winner of each congressional district, with the remaining two (representing the U.S. Senate votes) going to the statewide winner. Glennon is among many constitutional experts unwilling to denounce the electoral college as antiquated. "I'm agnostic on this question," he said. "No one can foresee the consequences of abolition. It's like a Rubik's Cube: If you change what's on one side, several other sides change as well," meaning abolition could have unforeseen results in how and where campaigns are waged and financed. Not surprisingly, Republicans yesterday were quicker to defend the system that is putting Bush in office despite Gore's bigger popular vote. Virginia Gov. James S. Gilmore III, a national co-chairman of Bush's Victory 2000 campaign, told his state's electors that while the electoral college was largely symbolic, it had taken on real meaning in the aftermath of this year's contest. "Imagine for just a moment, based on the experience we have had over the last number of weeks -- what if the election were decided by the popular vote?" Gilmore said. "But we have not suffered that consequence, because we have in America, in our republic, the electoral college." Staff writers Daniel LeDuc, R.H. Melton and Robert E. Pierre and researchers Lynn Davis and Madonna Lebling contributed to this report. 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