Ricky, did you ever check out that book or take a look at it, "The Dictator's Handbook: How Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics"? I cannot remember, but I thought I might have given you the link. It's actually quite relevant to the electoral college. If you end up getting it, they first mention the electoral college on page 5 to 6. I'm not finished the book yet as I am simultaneously reading LOTR (see my discussion on that one under "general discussion"). Kind of thoughtful in a way, that building a better government or more democratic one involves shifting around those three groups.

If we want to rescue the American Constitution (by which I don't necessary mean the actual Constitution of 1787, but the American People in a sense) from the clutches of those who woudl subvert popular power, the question is, what can we do?

This cannot be a debate on theoretical structures. So far we seem to have been debating, for several pages, how the electoral college works, or---in some people's opinions---how it fails to. But what does power really come down to?

The "three dimensions" as described by Alastair Smith and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (hey, if Ricky can quote Francis Fukuyama, I'll quote a book I like.... ) are the:

Nominal Selectorate (interchangeables)
Real Selectorate (influentials)
Winning Coalition (essentials)

Without getting into a discussion of how exactly these three groups interact, suffice to say that the average voter is part of the nominal selectorate. In a mathematical sense this group has only a little bit more say in the choice of the President than does his or her counterpart in pre-Glasnost Russia (where, believe it or not, there was actually voting, and it was mandatory in fact; but it was more or less exactly like voting in an election for a corporate Board of Directors on those little proxies they send out).

Now in none of these groups is necessarily the PACs and corporate donations represented. So they probably are added in somewhere (I haven't finished the book yet).

The idea, according to these guys, is not necessarily to make the first group as large as possible (though in a democracy you have to: you can't restrict anyone from voting at 18 in a universal suffrage democracy, right?) because a lot of dictatorships that hold regular "elections" have, believe it or not, universal suffrage. North Korea, believe it or not, has universal suffrage: it's just a sham. But the idea is to make that last group as huge as possible, and make the first and second groups practically overlap.

Question: can the electoral college do this as much as possible? And would the President's "winning coalition" (the essentials) still be very large?