After the presidential election eight years ago I wrote of how bizarre, and possibly dangerous, the results of the Electoral College were. This year the election seemed to be less close, so to the general public there is no immediate crisis and less concern. In fact the results are just as indefensible and the danger of a technical upset still lurks for the future. Let me show you again.

On the average this year each Electoral College vote should represent 223,048 voters. In fact in Massachusetts that average was 249,508. That is to say that each of our votes counted as nine-tenths of a vote. That's close enough to one person-one-vote that I used it to make comparisons with all states.

Had you voted in Rhode Island, your vote counted for two and a half as much. They get one electoral college vote for every 104,456 voters. That's not because they are so much wiser, but probably because the electoral college was designed to favor small states. I say probably because when you look at the entire picture even the small state explanation does not make sense. Nobody, not the Founding Fathers, nobody would design a system as illogical and unfair as what the electoral college has become.

Start with Alaska and the District of Columbia: Give each of their voters 31/2 votes. Then give three votes to every Vermonter and of course to those in Wyoming. Two and a half votes to each voter in Hawaii, Rhode Island and North Dakota.

The list of those who double their influence at two votes each includes Delaware, Maryland, South Dakota, Washington, and West Virginia. A lot of states get a little extra power at 11/2 votes. They are not all small: California, Idaho, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Nebraska, Michigan, Utah, New Hampshire, Maine, Montana and Arizona. All of the rest get just one vote, except Florida and Alabama, which get just three-fourths of one vote. Don't ask why.

You probably think that this is how it has always been.

No, the Electoral College has meant different things as times have changed. Some of the Founding Fathers disliked the idea of political parties and they distrusted the popular vote. So each community would select its outstanding citizens as electors.

They, not the people, would chose the president. The voters would not know the names of those being considered for president. They were to trust the outstanding electors who were their neighbors. Today few of us even know the names of the electors even if they are in fact the ones we voted for.

The electoral college never worked as intended. In today's nation nobody could call it wise or even fair. We do have nearly universal suffrage, mass communication and political parties. The Electoral College, though, not only counts the votes badly, it distorts the behavior of both the politicians and the media. How many of the candidates did you meet personally in Massachusetts? We didn't even get our share of their ads. (Maybe not so bad). More seriously, our opinions were ignored.

It's not likely that the small states, which also have inordinate power in Congress, will ever agree to a constitutional amendment to reform the system.

There is a proposal, though, which our legislature was considering last year that if enough states agreed to it would effectively bypass the Electoral College.

When enough states to constitute a majority of the Electoral College would agree to cast their electoral votes for the winner of the popular vote, whoever got the most popular votes would win. Every vote would be equal, no matter from what state.

Don't let your state senators and representatives forget this idea. There was no crisis this year, so it would be easy to forget (but the political process this year was as distorted as ever). Over the years I have looked at the Electoral College as a quaint but harmless anachronism. Now I know better. It is not only obsolete. It is a real hazard to democracy. We can now do something about it, before next time.

STERLING ALAM lives in Attleboro.