I'm generally favourably disposed towards parliamentarian government, which is essentially what you're suggesting, but it should be noted that it is not without its problems. Most notably, there is little separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches (not that I'm sure that there ever was much such separation in real life in any functioning democracy - the only time in the history of pre-parliamentarian Danish democracy that the distinction came to a head, the result was... not pretty).

That aside, you have far more fundamental problems with your democracy than the precise mechanics of the electoral college. To whit:

• A substantial fraction of your population is disenfranchised for various reasons.

• In many places you use a first past the post electoral scheme rather than a proportional representation scheme. As far as I can tell, FPTP does Really Bad Things for a country's political culture.

• Endemic corruption and rampant clientism. And no, that didn't start with Enron, Halliburton and Bechtel, as the etymology of the terms "pork barrel" and "banana republic" will attest.

The first and last of these issues are more cultural than constitutional, so if I could get one shot at changing your constitution, I'd go for replacing FPTP elections with proportional representation for all relevant bodies. Abolishing the voting weights assigned by the number of electors is, IMO, nice to have but not need to have compared to the elimination of FPTP voting.

Where I could see a role for the electoral college is for elections to bodies with only one seat (president, mayor, etc.). Here, the electoral college could be retooled as a cushion against vote waste by changing the election to it to proportional representation, and leaving it to the electors to form post-election coalitions.

A couple of examples would, perhaps, enlighten:

Gore, Nader and Bush run for POTUS

Gore gets 48 % of the vote
Bush gets 49 % of the vote
Nader gets 3 % of the vote

In a direct, countrywide FPTP election, Bush wins under this scenario. In my proposed scheme, Gore wins, because Nader's electors will presumably - when it becomes clear that there's no possible coalition that makes Nader president - prefer Gore over Bush.

(Under the current system, the winner depends on the precise pattern in which states are won and lost, which is more complicated, but a direct, countrywide FPTP election suffices for illustration.)

The Republicans, Democrats, Black Panther Party and the Greens run for Congress

R gets 47 % of the vote
D gets 43 % of the vote
BP gets 3 % of the vote
G gets 7 % of the vote

In the current system, only D and R would be represented (because BP and G don't gain pluralities in any states), and a full ten percent of the vote would be wasted. Under a proportional representation system, with four hundred and some Representatives, parties down to a quarter of a percent of the electorate can be represented, leading to much lower vote loss.

- Jake

640 kiloton should be enough for anybody