As the 538 members of the Electoral College met yesterday to ratify George W. Bush's razor-thin 271-to-266 victory (one Al Gore elector abstained), many Americans continued to question the system that awarded Mr. Bush the White House despite the vice president's 337,000-vote margin in the popular vote. A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll suggested that about 6 in 10 Americans would prefer to abandon the Electoral College and switch to a direct popular vote. Among others, New York's senator-elect, Hillary Rodham Clinton, has condemned the present system and promised to co-sponsor legislation abolishing it and providing for the direct election of the president. That would be a mistake. The Electoral College has enough benefits to justify its survival.

This was the first election since 1888, when Benjamin Harrison denied Grover Cleveland a second term, in which the electors chose a candidate who did not win the popular vote. But the Electoral College itself has come under fire at regular intervals. According to federal historians, over 700 proposals have been introduced in Congress in the last 200 years to reform or eliminate the system. Indeed, there have been more proposals for constitutional amendments to alter or abolish the Electoral College than on any other subject.

The most common complaint is that the system gives disproportionate weight to smaller states and is therefore inconsistent with the notion of one person one vote. Under the rules, each state gets electoral votes equal to the number of its representatives in the House, which are allocated by population, and another electoral vote for each senator. This senatorial ''add-on'' gives the smaller states extra weight. With the add-on, New York, for example, has one electoral vote for every 550,000 people, while South Dakota has one for every 232,000. Looked at another way, Mr. Bush captured 73 electoral votes in 12 small states with a combined population equal to California's, whereas Mr. Gore received only 54 for winning California itself.

Yet the arguments for the Electoral College are also compelling, and in our view, outweigh the majoritarian case put forward by Mrs. Clinton and others. The nation's founders sought in various creative ways to create checks and balances, both inside and outside government. The Electoral College was first and foremost a compact among states, large and small, designed to ensure that one state or one region did not dominate the others. As Charles Fried noted in a recent Op-Ed piece, it was and is one of those safeguards of a balanced federalism -- much like the allocation of two senators to each state, regardless of size. And by offering the promise that even the smallest states could tip the balance in close elections, the system made it impossible to ignore them. This, in turn, required presidential candidates to build alliances across ideological and geographical lines.