by Sondra Deuber

Created on: April 13, 2008

It was probably in high school Civics class that I first learned about the Electoral College. (Civics is an old fashioned concept that required students to learn about the workings of their government. It's possible that this outdated concept is not considered important enough to teach, as it would take important time from learning to pass standardized tests.)

I've often wondered why we vote at all, since the popular vote may not matter in the long run. Actually, we could possibly skip the whole process and come out with results not significantly different from what we get after spending gazillions of dollars on elections, election hardware, software, or plain old paper ballots and pencils! Occasionally we get the President we vote for. Most recently, we've learned that it really doesn't matter who we vote for. We're not the ones whose votes matter.

We begin the election process with a small minority of those eligible to do so voting in the primaries or caucuses. Delegates for the national conventions "are those individuals authorized by the national and state parties to attend the parties' national conventions and cast votes for the candidates running for the respective party's nomination for President. Each national party apportions a specific number of delegate votes to the various states and territories, based on state population and complex calculations of party strength and support in recent elections." (AOL News: Election 08). Pledged delegates' votes at the national convention are assigned to candidates based on the primary and caucus votes and, until 1982 the Presidential nominee was selected by the delegate votes.

Super Delegates appeared on the scene in 1982, when the Democratic "party leaders allocated for themselves a heaping portion of the delegates, creating positions called super delegates. Every Democratic member of Congress, every Democratic governor and all of the elected members of the Democratic National Committee (the majority of the super delegates) were each granted a vote at the convention. Party leaders assumed this would help them retain a measure of control over the process - and of course continue to be granted the bounty of political favors that historically flowed from backing the right horse at the convention. In 2008, the 796 super delegates will make up about 20% of the entire convention. Winning the nomination requires 2,025 delegates."

"In creating the super delegates, Democratic Party leaders sought to show that although they

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