Dude, this is pretty messed up right here. With 66 out of 67 counties reporting in the Florida recount, George W. Bush is ahead of Al Gore by 961 votes.

An unofficial AP count of all counties gives Bush a 327 vote lead. New Mexico, once called for Gore, is now undecided. Palm Beach County is recounting their 425,000 ballots by hand. Bush’s lawyers are suing to block the recounts. Democrats like Jesse Jackson are crying fraud or, like Palm Beach residents, just plain crying over voting for Buchanan on an oddly designed ballot. Overseas ballots won’t all arrive in Florida until possibly the end of this week.

Last Monday, I never imagined it would be this close. In the last few weeks leading up to the election, things didn’t look too bright for the Democratic faithful. Bush held on to a small lead in nearly every poll and Nader supporters adamantly refused to swing their support to Gore. I assumed a clean Bush victory.

In the first few hours of election night, hope returned when Gore’s early take of Florida seemed to prematurely end Bush’s chances for the rest of the night.

After a heart-stopping reversal, my worst fears were slowly coming true as Bush sacked podunk little state after state. Gore caught up by winning the big ones and things were tied. I went to bed with Florida and Oregon undetermined, before the call-happy networks prematurely declared Bush the winner.

Almost a week later, we still don’t have a president-elect. Our future president could be determined on the pending recount in Palm Beach county, Florida. On the ballot, the presidential candidates were listed alternately on two sides of a page with the punch holes descending vertically down the middle of the page. Gore was listed second on the left page, directly under Bush, but the second punch hole belonged to Buchanan, the first candidate on the right page.

The end result was 30,000 ballots punched twice or not at all. In addition, there was an unusually high amount of Buchanan support in an area with a large, elderly Jewish population.

Buchanan himself noted on the “Today” show that the votes likely do not belong to him – “I don’t want any votes that I did not receive and I don’t want to win any votes by mistake. It seems to me that these 3,000 votes people are talking about — most of those are probably not my vote and that may be enough to give the margin to Mr. Gore,” he said.

Despite this controversy, a recent manual recount of one percent of the ballots in Palm Beach yielded an additional 19 votes for Gore. If that discrepancy is true of all the county’s ballots, the ongoing manual recount of the entire county is enough to swing the state to Gore.

Still, if Bush maintains his lead and carries Florida, he’ll be our next president. Gore will have handily won the popular vote by a margin of about 200,000, but Bush will have garnered over the 270 electoral votes necessary to win the office. We’ll have elected a president to the office who did not receive the plurality of the vote.

This is not cool. It is unacceptable for the system to place into office a man who did not win the plurality of the vote. The Electoral College has more or less worked in the past, but it is no longer representing the best interests of voters in this election by failing to award the candidate who received the majority of votes.

The system goes counter to democracy, because it says individual votes don’t matter, only who wins each state. That’s not right. To make every vote count, we should abolish the Electoral College.

It would give new relevance to voters whose political opinion is a minority in their state. I’d wager Republican turnout in Democrat-saturated states like New York would increase, and Democratic support in states like Texas would increase as well. These people would know their votes were ultimately going to their candidate, not lost when the victor they did not support took the entirety of their state’s electoral votes.

A one-sentence bill calling for the elimination of the Electoral College was proposed in 1993 by Congressman Mike McNulty of New York. It could be presented at any time. We need only demand its passage.

It may be too late for Gore, but we owe it to ourselves to ensure that the will of the American people is never mistaken again.