The framers of the U.S. Constitution were faced with an awesome challenge: define a system by which a country -- comprised of 13 states (of varying size, which jealously guarded their rights and were suspicious of centralized government) and with a population of 4 million people who were not connected by geography, transportation, or communication lines -- could elect a President. These were the daunting issues faced by the Founding Fathers when they set out to design the United States' electoral system.

After much debate, they settled on the Electoral College, a system that has sparked a great deal of discussion over the course of America's history and which, in response to the controversial 2000 Presidential election, has again come under scrutiny.

Before the pros and cons of the system can be weighed, its mechanisms must be understood; here is a brief -- and simplified -- summary of how the Electoral College functions. Each state has a number of electors equal to the number of its U.S. senators (2 in each state), plus the number of its U.S. representatives (which varies according to the state's population). No state can have less than three electoral votes, and the electors themselves are chosen by the leading legislators of each state. The Electoral College is currently composed of 538 electors: 535 representing the number of congressional members, plus 3 for Washington, D.C. It takes a total of 270 electoral votes for a candidate to win the presidency.

During a presidential election, the candidate who receives the popular majority vote in each state wins the votes of all the Electors in that state. In an election year, on the Monday following the second Wednesday of December, the Electors meet in their respective State capitals and cast their electoral votes, which are sealed and delivered to the President of the Senate. On January 6, the votes are opened and read before both houses of Congress. The candidate with an absolute majority of electoral votes is declared president. If there is not an absolute majority, the House of Representatives elects the president from among the top three contenders, with each state casting only one vote (again, an absolute majority is required to win the election). At noon on January 20, the president is sworn into office.

Many critics of the Electoral College acknowledge that this system served a useful purpose when it was developed, but argue that now its time has passed. They argue that the old system should be replaced by a direct democracy, which would eliminate representatives and allow Americans to vote directly on issues and candidates. Proponents of the Electoral College, like William C. Kimberling, disagree. He wrote, "The fact that the Electoral College was originally designed to solve one set of problems but today serves to solve an entirely different set of problems is a tribute to the genius of the Founding Fathers and to the durability of the American federal system."

Think you know where you stand on this issue? During the course of this activity, we will ask you four more times: Should the United States replace the Electoral College system with a direct democracy? Based on your responses, we will argue the opposite points of view. Only your final vote will count toward the results of this poll.