The Electoral College worked this time. It looks like the final count in this election will be 286-252, a wide enough margin so that the failures of the system won’t affect the outcome. But we still need reform.

The least populous states are vastly overrepresented by today’s system. One person’s vote counts almost four times more in Wyoming than it does in Texas. The way we divide the votes has to change if we want a truly fair election.

Each state now gets one electoral vote for each of its congressmen and senators. In New York, that’s 31 – two senators plus 29 congressmen. But when a state like Vermont has the bare minimum, 1 congressman and two senators, its three votes outweigh those of the big states. New York has 30 times the population, but only 10 times the votes.

Some people defend the Electoral College as they would the Senate – small states need to be overrepresented, they say, or the candidates won’t care. But no one cares about size; they care about swing. Nevada’s five votes got attention because they could go either way, and the candidates ignored California as much as Alaska.

The Founding Fathers didn’t care, either. The Electoral College was their compromise between the popular vote and a president elected by Congress. Cross-country communication was slow and unreliable, so the states filtered the public voice to make sure it was well informed.

But their system doesn’t quite work today. We need to eliminate the Congress-based vote system and determine each state’s representation by population. Let’s take a quick exercise in democracy and see how it would work.

In our imaginary Electoral College, each state gets one vote per 500,000 residents, based on the 2000 census.

Only six states gain more than two votes, and none loses more than that. The big winners are California (+12) and Texas (+7). New York gains six, Florida four, Pennsylvania and Illinois three. That’s a slight win for the blue states, and it would have made this election closer – but George W. Bush would still clearly, and more fairly, be the president.

The fair system would have yielded a 273-262 vote, a 2.1 percent difference. The spread this year was 6.3 percent. Same outcome, more precise results.

What about this year’s result? Informed or not, one thing is for sure: some of our voices are still too loud.