Many years ago, in a time so far back that it is visible to me now only through the milk glass filters of reminiscence and nostalgia, I was a student at the College of Wooster, in Wooster, Ohio. It was a fine school then and remains so today, thank you, but that was a far different era, a time midway between Dobie Gillis and Lenny Bruce. And the transition from Dobie to Lenny, which I witnessed and even helped to promote, was awkward and fitful, and reminds me in a surreal way of this crazy presidential election we are enduring. Who would have thought that just voting would turn out to be so complex?

In those days back at the College of Wooster, men stayed in the men's dorms and women stayed in the women's dorms. That's the way it had always been and seemingly would be forever. Holden Hall was where most of the women seemed to live, a creaking wooden building guarded by blue-haired house mothers who viewed their mission in life as keeping the girls in their rooms at night and me in the front parlor or, better still, in the Army or perhaps in jail. Frankly, their judgement in these things was pretty good.

Those were times of sexual inequality. Guys like me could wander the campus with impunity while the women students had to sign in and out of their dorms using a system of cards and a timeclock just like the one down at the Rubbermaid plant. They had to be in their rooms by 10 p.m., I recall, and I think there may even have been a time for lights out. Of course, it was a system that was arbitrary and cruel and so we plotted its demise. It was one of those systems that had always been in effect and remained in effect for only that reason. "That's just the way we do things around here," the old biddies said.

Then one night we stole the time cards from Holden Hall. The girl who was stationed at the front desk had gone upstairs for a few moments and that's all it took for the crime to be completed. We denizens of the front parlor, we estrogen junkies, leapt the rail, grabbed the cards, and stole into the night. Within an hour, the cards were burning in a ceremonial crypt.

A most amazing thing happened when our crime was detected. Nothing happened at all. Of course, we didn't announce our action like some third world revolutionary organization might have, but almost nobody seemed to notice. And where it would have logically followed that the time cards would be replaced within hours, they weren't replaced at all, ever. The era of time cards at Holden Hall ended that night without a whimper but WITH a catalyst — our crime. The time card era would eventually have ended just because it was unfair, but that might have taken months, maybe even years. It ended that particular night because of us.

Now back to the election, which seems to be in its current uncertain position entirely because of the Electoral College, an institution even more time-honored and precisely as useful as those time cards at Holden Hall. At a time when states are making noises about Internet voting, the very fact that we have such a vestigial political appendage as an Electoral College makes no sense at all. Dump it, I say. And use this current election fiasco as the inspiration for doing so.

The major historical justification of the Electoral College was to perpetuate smarmy political paternalism and to make it easier to rig elections. Sure there was also the idea that the Electoral College was a more efficient way to vote in a large nation with a sparse agrarian population that required many days' ride on horseback to get to the Capitol. Washington, D.C., is so far away from my home in California, in fact, that I have never visited there by horse. Not many people have.

We haven't NEEDED the Electoral College since the invention of the telegraph. But it didn't really qualify as a useless institution until, I suppose, the broad adoption of radio in the 1920s. With the advent of radio news coverage of elections, the communication of political will became two-way and pretty much instantaneous. Now that we have almost universal telephones and televisions and more than half of American are on the Internet, well, the Electoral College has transcended, moving into a state of complete absurdity.

Even the arguments for preserving the Electoral College are absurd, generally coming down to "we keep it because it hasn't hurt us much." There have been only three presidential elections — none of them in the 20th or 21st centuries — in which the vote of the Electoral College has diverged from the popular vote. So we keep the thing, I suppose, because it doesn't mean anything. Except this week it suddenly does mean something.

I am not proposing that we break rules or ignore traditions or throw the bums out, but there ARE times for traditions to change and this is one of those times. The technological reasons for preserving the Electoral College haven't been valid for at least 150 years, leaving only habit and power brokering to support it. This absurd institution might have lingered for another hundred years without the catalyst of the current election. We probably can't expect it to make any difference for the present contest, which will wallow in rancor and lawyers for weeks to come, but we can decide that it won't happen this way again.

If there is a good side to this political situation, my friend Tom says it's that all that money retirees from New York spent putting their children through law school might pay off for them. Hordes of lawyers are descending on Florida to try to help their near sighted relatives, or at the very least file thousands of lawsuits for some sort of fraud. At least they'll be around to have Thanksgiving dinner with their parents.

And speaking of bad ideas, I've come across several this week, two of which really stand out. Thankfully, at least these bad ideas are not American. First there is Jalda, a Swedish micropayment system launched in September by Ericsson Hewlett-Packard Telecommunications, who should know better. Jalda is like PayPal if PayPal was being run by Larry Flynt. The plan is simple. They sell scratch cards just like the ones you can buy here for long distance phone calls. You scratch off the card to reveal a PIN number. Then you enter the PIN into Jalda-enabled Web sites to pay for things. Now young Johnny can access pay-per-view pornography and buy his beer, cigarettes, and drugs online without leaving any evidence on mommy's credit card. Maybe they should have sold the pin numbers online and only to credit card holders.

But nothing is more stupid than the burglary of Sweden's Big Brother Reality TV house. The unwitting burglar was seen by 17 video cameras broadcasting live on the Internet! When they caught him, he swore he'd done nothing wrong. You know there might be a business in this. Post thousands of security camera video feeds online. Anyone who is watching and reports a crime in progress hits the big red hyperlink that dials the police. If you are first to report a crime you win a prize and that prize is even better if the crook is nabbed. The power of the Web!