One of the oddest things about American politics, at least to an outside observer, is the electoral college system. It seems quaint that the country which considers itself the beacon of democracy for the world (much to the annoyance of places like Greece, where it was invented; or India, where it is larger) clings to a quaint system where the leader is chosen not by popular vote, but in essence a series of statewide elections. Rather than being an artifact of the messy process of drafting our Constitution, however, the electoral college system helps ensure that our President is chosen in a way which helps unite us as a country, rather than divide us.

Under the electoral college, to become President, a candidate must win not a majority of the popular vote, but a majority of the electoral votes. Each state has a number of votes to cast (equal to the number of seats in Congress which that state holds), and states have winner-take-all contests. So, in Minnesota, which has eight members of the House of Representatives and two senators, there are ten electoral votes. California gets 54 votes, and the Dakotas get three votes each. The states with the most electoral votes are: California (54), New York (33), Texas (32), Florida (25), and Pennsylvania (23). It is not necessary to win all, or even any, of these big states to become President, but it sure helps.

What the electoral system does is force candidates--at least those who hope to win--to spread their attention across the entire country, rather than focusing on those areas in which they are stronger. Once a candidate has enough votes to win in a given state, any additional campaigning in that state is useless, so the candidates are forced to go places where they're not winning: in other words, to reach out to voters in places where the candidate isn't as well-known or well-liked.

Let's take a hypothetical (and simplistic) example of a Hollywood version of the United States consisting of just California, New York, Texas, Florida, and Pennsylvania (this is the Hollywood version because when was the last time you saw a movie set in Iowa or Utah?). For simplicity, we'll assume that each state's population is one million per electoral vote, so the layout looks like this:

State	Population	Electoral Votes
California	54 Million	54
New York	33 Million	33
Texas	32 Million	32
Florida	25 Million	25
Pennsylvania	23 Million	23

In this version of America, there are 167 total electoral votes, and 84 needed to win. There are no must-win states, but California plus either New York or Texas is good enough.

Now, suppose we have two candidates running, Abe Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. Jefferson Davis is a firebrand who is wildly popular in his core states of Texas and Florida, where he gets 75% of the vote (to Lincoln's pathetic 25%) by pandering to regional interests, but makes relatively little effort to reach out to the other three states. Abe Lincoln, in contrast, is willing to moderate his opinions enough to win a narrow majority in California, New York, and Pennsylvania. The results of the election are:

State	Population	Electoral Votes	Popular Votes for Lincoln	Electoral Votes for Lincoln	Popular Votes for Davis	Electoral Votes for Davis
California	54 Million	54	28 Million	54	26 Million	0
New York	33 Million	33	17 Million	33	16 Million	0
Texas	32 Million	32	8 Million	0	24 Million	32
Florida	25 Million	25	6 Million	0	19 Million	25
Pennsylvania	23 Million	23	12 Million	23	11 Million	0
Totals			71 Million	110	96 Million	57

So what gives? Jefferson Davis won the popular vote by a landslide, but lost the election to Lincoln? Why is this a good thing?

The electoral college benefits America as a whole because it punishes presidential candidates who cling to relatively narrow regional interests. In this hypothetical example, Lincoln would become President not because he was the most popular candidate (he wasn't) but because his views appealed to a majority of voters across a broader geographic base.

Had Davis chosen to moderate his opinions somewhat, say, enough to win an additional two million votes in California, that would be enough to make him President, even if it meant giving up ten million votes in Texas and Florida. The winning strategy is not to be the most popular candidate, but to be the candidate who can spread his popularity across enough different parts of the country to win majorities in enough states.

Without the electoral college we would almost certainly see a series of Presidential candidates more like Davis than Lincoln, simply because it is easier (and cheaper) to focus your efforts on a small region which can deliver enough votes. Presidential elections would become a series of regional candidates vying to see whose region was the most cohesive.

In their wisdom, our founding fathers created a system which avoids pitting the Western candidate against the Eastern candidate; or the Southern candidate against the Northern candidate. Correctly, they saw that this dynamic would likely tear the country apart.

In fact, it nearly did: one of the triggers for the Civil War was the perception that (the real) Abe Lincoln was the Northern candidate out to impose Northern interests and values on the South. Since the North had enough electoral votes at the time to win the Presidency, the South felt as though it wasn't being represented by the system.

America is now large enough and diverse enough that no one region has the ability to elect a President all by itself, which is reenforced by the structure of the electoral college. The result is that all candidates have to reach out to a diversity of interests if they hope to win, rather than focusing on a core power base.