I do know, though, that two proposed election reforms -- abolishing the Electoral College and replacing the poll-based voting system -- are not at all the way to avert future debacles.

"The Electoral College is a loser and should be voted out," shrieked the Boston Globe in its lead Sunday editorial. Granted, the College is something of a constitutional relic, established for three arguably obsolete reasons: to insulate the presidential election from the hoi polloi, to discourage the marginalization of small states (as in the constitutional Great Compromise), and to promote political balance between North and South (read: free states and slave states). But scrapping the Electoral College in favor of direct, nationwide presidential elections would have several unpleasant effects.

First, national politics would quickly break free of state and local affairs. No more will "presidential candidates court governors for their endorsements, appear at rallies with local political figures, [or] learn the names of state party officials," said Harvard law professor Charles Fried in Saturday's New York Times.

Furthermore, predicted Fried, national television would play an even larger role in national elections, "lead[ing] to a further Starbucks-ification of our political life, where every locality and region would slowly homogenize with every other into one undifferentiated mass."

Our revered system of federalism, replaced by McPolitics.

Yes, presidential candidates in recent races have more and more appealed to stereotypical "average" Americans, but at least they've worked through the existing local and state political networks, hobnobbed with local and state bigwigs, and acknowledged local and state concerns. With no Electoral College, local and state identities would be total non-factors in nationwide races. Perhaps the stage would then be set for the decline of states as distinct political entities; eventually, they'd just be lines on a map.

And to those who dispute this, to those who claim that the Electoral College is just a bygone tradition, I offer this example: If there had been no Electoral College in 1972, Massachusetts residents could never have distinguished themselves as citizens of the only state in the Union not to vote for Nixon with bumper stickers reading, "Don't blame me; I'm from Massachusetts." Think about it.

Other pundits have demanded the replacement of our traditional poll-based voting system with something a little more cutting-edge. Oregon, for instance, now has voting-by-mail, and Arizona has begun to experiment with electronic voting. E-voting, especially, has excited technological utopians, who claim that if we abolish paper ballots and eliminate polling places, voter turnout will increase significantly and America will move that much closer to true democracy. Plus, claim its proponents, e-voting would make obsolete ballot-counting controversies of the sort now exploding in Florida.

There are all the usual objections to e-voting. It will be expensive to implement. Security and authentication are major concerns, particularly given Americans' twitchiness about privacy and identification by the government. Training people to vote electronically will necessarily be painstaking and arduous, and e-voting may in any case discriminate against individuals or groups with low rates of computer ownership and literacy. Utopians breezily dismiss these concerns, and they do have a point; admittedly, e-voting does seem a logical next step in our democratic evolution.

But what the utopians miss is that neither e-voting nor voting-by-mail does anything to increase engagement among the electorate, an attachment to the political process that creates genuine interest and concern among voters for the issues and candidates. Indeed, e-voting actually decreases engagement. The easier it is to vote, the less one has to know or care about it in order to be able to do it.

With that in mind, increased turnout could well be a disaster; millions of uninformed, relatively uninterested new voters, "empowered" by e-voting technologies, would carelessly cast ballots from the sofa between acts of Friends -- not based on a thoughtful analysis of the issues, but probably for the candidates whose campaigns have the most ad appeal. Wouldn't that be grand? If you think campaigns are all flash and no filament now, wait until the polling places start to disappear.

At least under the current system, voters actually have to be sufficiently energized to go to the polls and stand in line. This is just what Robert Putnam, another Harvard prof, talks about in his recent book Bowling Alone -- he posits that the postwar decline in American civic life is largely due to the replacement of local social, church, and community group meetings by nationwide mailings designed expressly to solicit contributions. Sure, political advocacy groups boast millions of "members" -- but most of them are not involved in group activities at all; they just send checks to headquarters.

The American electorial system has served us reasonably well for over two centuries. Ignore rash calls for the abolition of the Electoral College and for a stampede toward a non-poll-based method of voting. If we want to contemplate electorial improvements, let's move to enrich our civic life, not to further impoverish it. Until then, a little controversy now and again is a small price to pay.