The electoral college is not the problem, the problem is the lack of a viable platform and candidacy from a third party candidate. A true independent candidate has a fair shot of winning any election, especially when considering that approximately 30% of registered voters are Democrats, and 30% are Republicans, that means that there are 40% who are not declared or independent. That means if a third party candidate would come along that actually has a legitimate platform, they have a great chance of picking up those 40% of the votes.

Your contention that the electoral college is rigged shows you little understanding of the constitutional republic in which we live. The President is the leader of the republic. The republic is made up of the 50 individual states that make up the United States. The electoral college was devised so that no one state would have more power than any others. The college gives 2 votes each to each state, and then the remaining votes are distributed to the states according to population, represented by the number of elected representatives each states have, thus there are 535 electoral votes.

In each of the preceeding two elections, President Bush has carried 30 and 31 states respectively. Would it be right to the country had in the 2000 election the candidate that carried only 20 states be the winner. Clearly, 30 states make up more of the nation than 20, thus the electoral college provided the winner.

Before you make a statement, you need to check your premise. Here endth the lesson.

dmk