“Spring is here,” wrote the poet – I paraphrase – “and a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of love.” But now spring is long gone and Labor Day has passed, and in an election year that means a rapidly aging pundit’s fancy will turn to thoughts of the Electoral College.

Is the Electoral College obsolete? The question is one of the perennial worries of the commentating class – right up there with low voter turnout, the influence of negative advertisements, and the curse of Big Money in the political process. No doubt we’ll consider those, too, as the general election closes in, but this season the issue of the Electoral College takes on unexpected significance.

Notwithstanding the “convention bump” enjoyed by President Bush in the polls, the election promises to be close – once again, among other places, in Florida, where the fiasco of 2000 led many people to call for an overhaul of the way Americans select their president.

Another result like 2000 – in which one candidate, Vice President Gore, a Democrat, won the popular vote while the other, Mr. Bush, a Republican, won the White House, thanks to the Electoral College count – will only reinforce the belief that the present system frustrates the majority’s will. More to the point, this year voters in Colorado face a ballot initiative, which, if approved, could undermine the logic of the Electoral College and even signal its gradual demise, beginning this year.

Colorado’s electoral votes, like those of all but two other states, are “winner-take-all”: Whoever wins a majority of the state’s popular vote wins all its electors. Maine and Nebraska use slightly more complicated formulas that usually result in winner-take-all. The Colorado initiative would scrap this arrangement. Beginning with the presidential election, it would award the state’s nine electoral votes proportionally, according to the popular vote – most likely, five electors to the winner, four to the loser.

Mr. Bush won Colorado in 2000 and will probably do so again. Were the initiative in place four years ago, however, Mr. Gore would have won at least three of the state’s electoral votes and would be president today. And that’s what could happen to Senator Kerry this year, if the initiative passes. Which is why the initiative’s supporters are overwhelmingly Democratic – though, of course, they claim their cause transcends mere partisanship.

As one Democratic state senator, Ron Tupa, told the Associated Press last month: “It will give voters the unique opportunity to reform an outdated system that disenfranchises hundreds of thousands of Colorado voters.” That single sentence – like the logic behind the initiative – contains errors that are worth unpacking one at a time.

For starters: Is the Electoral College outdated? There are, indeed, superficial reasons to think so. In a helpful new book, “After the People Vote,” published by the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute and edited by an AEI research fellow, John C. Fortier, several scholars point out that the founders designed the Electoral College to meet conditions that no longer exist.

For example, writes the political scientist Martin Diamond, they feared that “a straightforward national election was ‘impracticable’ in a country as large as America, given the poor internal communications it then had.”

Moreover, the college was designed to smooth over differences in suffrage rules among the states – particularly those raised by slavery, which swelled the population of slave states without increasing the number of voters.

Nowadays, of course, slavery is long gone, and internal communications are much improved. So why keep the college? Mr. Fortier has an answer: Federalism.

Far from being an anachronism, the Electoral College is essential to the way political power in America is acquired, distributed, and used. States were not designed as simple administrative instruments of the federal government; they are centers of power in their own right. That means that power is distributed broadly around the country rather than centralized in a single place, and the Electoral College reinforces the decentralization.

“This isn’t France, where the entire country is run from Paris,” Mr. Fortier says. “The Electoral College system forces the candidates into the states. It requires them to deal with these smaller units and the various political cultures they find there. “The winner, then, must truly be a national candidate whose constituency spans regional lines. This is also the answer to the charge that the college “disenfranchises” voters, as though it were a violation of the principle of “one man, one vote.”

As Mr. Fortier points out, the presidential election is still a popular election – but the Electoral College forces those popular votes to be aggregated at the state level, again in the service of producing a genuinely national candidate. And there’s one other problem with the Colorado idea: It will hurt Colorado.

With eight or nine electoral votes up for grabs, Colorado is worth a presidential candidate’s attention. But if the winner will get only a net gain of one vote – the likely outcome in Colorado if electors are awarded proportionally – the state won’t be worth the trouble.

If the initiative passes, in other words, Mr. Kerry might be the winner in 2004 but Colorado would be the loser in the long run. Here, then, is yet another illustration of why we should distrust professional partisans like those who want to impose their terrible idea on Colorado: They never think things through.