l College. Most Americans assume the President is elected by the popular vote. In fact, he is elected by the Electoral College. This eighteenth-century device reflects the "Great Compromise" negotiated by the framers [of the Constitution] between big and small states.
Each state sends a number of electors to the college corresponding to its two senators (reflecting the state's quasi-sovereign nature), and the number of its representatives, reflecting its population.
So delegates can run from three (two senators and a single congressman), for half a dozen small states with fewer people than many English counties, to 54 for California with its 38 million people.
However narrow the margin in the popular vote in any individual state, the state's whole tally in the college is supposed to go to the winner.
If he holds off the Florida challenges, Bush would win with 270 votes in the college unless more than a single college member were, as the phrase goes, "faithless". And in fact a certain number of electors in comparatively recent times have switched, as a Richard Nixon elector switched to George Wallace in 1968 and in 1976 a Gerald Ford elector switched to Ronald Reagan, then a "write-in" candidate.
Some states, however, enforce the electors' mandate, and a federal statute gives Congress the right to reject a vote not "regularly given". Arguably, if Gore proves to have won the popular vote, more than one elector might feel obliged to reflect the popular plurality.
If that happened, it would trigger a mountainous constitutional and legal, as well as political, row. If, for whatever reason, the Electoral College were to fail to come up with a decisive result, then, as in 1876, the issue would go to the House of Representatives, that is, to the new House, in which the Republican majority is down to 10, with two independents and one seat undecided.
So on the face of the constitutional rules it is unlikely, though still conceivable, that Gore could win. Politically, however, Gore could be faced with a tough decision. In 1960, there was good reason to suspect that John F. Kennedy only won the election thanks to fraud on the part of Lyndon Johnson in Texas and Mayor Richard Daley (father of Gore's campaign manager this year) in Chicago.
However Nixon, the loser, decided not to challenge the result. In his memoirs, Nixon claimed that he did not want to bring the presidency into disrepute in the tense Cold War climate of the time.
He probably also calculated that it would be bad for his own career to look like a bad loser. Gore has a similar calculation to make. Probably he has already decided to press the Florida challenge but, if it fails, to concede with as good grace as he can muster - probably, but no one can be certain.
Another factor that might influence him is that, if he were to recapture Florida, the Republicans might be tempted to reopen possible issues of irregularity in other states. That would put a number of cats among some potentially messy pigeons and would do serious damage to the already fragile reputation of the US electoral system.
The likely upshot, therefore, is that the result of the election will not be decided in a matter of hours, but will be known in a matter of weeks, and formally determined on 6 January, when the president of the Senate officially opens the Electoral College ballots.
Such a delay of almost two months would not be entirely cost-free. Political uncertainty could conceivably set off a more or less significant market fall. And the prestige of the presidency would suffer. How much does this near dead-heat matter? Does it reflect serious flaws in the constitutional system, or any unhealthy condition in the body politic?
Americans themselves are debating these questions, in online chat rooms, in bars, on television and in the columns of newspapers. Does it matter? Yes, it does. It has already been difficult for some years to move major legislation through Congress, essentially because party organisation counts for less and less.
Congressmen and senators get to Washington without much help from 