This year, the Electoral College could play a bigger part in the presidential election than it has for over a hundred years. Democratic candidate Vice President Al Gore and Republican candidate Governor George W. Bush are in such a close race that one might end up having more popular votes than the other, but still lose the race.

The Electoral College is a group of 538 people who officially select the president. Within each state, the candidate who receives the most votes then chooses all the electors from the state. Each state is given a number of electors equal to the number of senators and congressmen that it has. As a result, a heavily-populated state like California has 54 electoral votes, while the smaller population of Missouri gives it 11 votes.

Saint Louis University Adjunct Political Science Professor Joseph Davis said that using an indirect method to choose the head of state isn’t that unusual. In parliamentary systems, such as Great Britain’s, the prime minister is selected by the parliament itself. “The electoral college is essentially the third house of Congress,” he said.

In this year’s election a strange possibility exists, though. If one of the candidates wins the electoral votes of many larger states by small margins and then loses many small states by a large number of votes, he could have a smaller number of popular votes in the nation but a majority of the electoral votes.

The most likely of these scenarios would be for Bush to win the popular vote and lose the presidency, but it could potentially go either way. Davis said, “It absolutely depends, 100 percent, on voter turnout. I could predict the winner right now, if you gave me a six point spread [on voting rates].”

If something strange does happen in this election, it could have big consequences. Davis believes that a groundswell movement to change the electoral college system would begin that could result in a constitutional amendment. He also warned against making sudden drastic changes.

“For all the problems of the electoral college, it is an integral part of the political system,” Davis said. “You can’t just grab the distributor off of a Dodge and bolt it on to a Ford. We should be very cautious about attempting to make a quick fix.”