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One of the reasons Al Gore says that he continues to pursue legal challenges to George W. Bush's victory in the presidential election is that Gore "won" the popular vote. Did Gore really win the popular vote, or is this another convenient fabrication? Let's examine a few facts.

• First, absentee ballots in most states are not counted if their number is too small to affect the margin of victory. Reportedly, there are 1 million absentee ballots for president in California that will not be counted since they could not possibly affect the outcome of the Electoral College vote in California. The number is probably more than 1,500,000 votes nationwide. Since absentee ballots tend to be disproportionately Republican, counting these ballots could conceivably reverse Gore's popular vote lead.

• Second, because of the presence of third party candidates Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan, both Gore and Bush received less than a majority of the vote, approximately 48% each. Can someone who wins 48% of the popular vote be considered the popular vote winner solely because he got a few more votes than his opponent? True, Gore received a larger percentage of the popular vote than Clinton did in 1992. (In fact, Clinton is the only U.S. president to be elected twice without receiving a majority of the popular vote either time. His "landslide" victories in the Electoral College were largely due to the presence of third party candidate H. Ross Perot -- Clinton won 43% of the popular vote in 1992 and 49% of the popular vote in 1996.) If Gore's 48% in the 2000 elections qualifies him to be the popular vote winner, how about 28%? This could happen in a 4-way race in which the candidates were fairly evenly divided.

• Third, both Bush and Gore crafted their election strategies to win the Electoral College, not the popular vote. Bush would not have spent so much time and money in West Virginia if did not matter who won West Virginia. He would have spent his money piling up huge majorities in Texas and the South.

Hillary Clinton, newly elected senator from New York, has promised to introduce a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College in order to elect the president by popular vote (could it be that she's considering a run in 2004?). This would strip away part of the federal system that our constitution was designed around without solving the problems that have sparked the recent complaints about the electoral college. (The United States is a union of states, many of which are larger than most countries. If the United Nations elected its Secretary General by popular vote among all the countries, the winner would always be Chinese.) Even with a popular vote, a narrow election could still come down to a few disputed ballots that would end up being resolved by a court. How would a popular election scheme deal with no candidate receiving a majority? Most countries would hold a run-off election--is this what Mrs. Clinton has in mind? Or should we just let someone become president who has 48% or 28% or 18% of the popular vote simply because he outpolled his competitors? This is how both Adolph Hitler and Salvador Allende (briefly the communist president of Chile before being ousted in a military coup) came to power. In addition, electing the president by popular vote introduces a new set of problems, like uniform voting standards (for example, Massachusetts allows convicted felons to vote, while Texas does not) and uniform counting (should a partially punched ballot card be counted or not, and who will decide?).

In the meantime, let's not have any more nonsense about who "won" the popular vote. It all depends on what your definition of "won" is, and there are many ballots that will never be counted, anyway. Under our constitution, it's the electoral vote that counts, and the legitimacy of the president winning a majority of the votes of the electoral college should not be undermined by his failure to win the popular vote. If it were, then both Clinton and Abraham Lincoln were not legitimate presidents, since neither received a majority of the popular vote.