Ten years since the disputed presidential election of 2000, the electoral college still has not been abolished.

United States presidential elections in 1824, 1876, and most recently in 2000 have demonstrated that the electoral college system makes it possible for a person to be elected president of the United States without winning the votes of a majority of all of the citizens throughout the nation who voted in that particular election.

In the electoral college, electors are apportioned to each state based on state population, and using a “winner take all” system, in 48 states (only Maine and Nebraska don’t use the “winner take all” system) all electors of the state are pledged to vote for the candidate receiving the most popular votes in that state. Virtually every time, electors have actually voted in the electoral college for the candidate they are pledged to. A rare exception happened in 1988 when one elector reversed the names of Dukakis and Bentsen, voting for Bentsen for president.

The electoral college was created due to the lack of confidence the founding fathers of the United States had in the “common man” to successfully select competent leaders on their own. Even United States senators were not elected by popular vote until 1913, when the 17th amendment to the US constitution went into effect.

Following the disputed presidential election of 2000, it is very surprising that the electoral college has still not been abolished and how little or no public outcry is heard in support of abolishing the electoral college. Is anyone really looking forward to election night 2012 thinking that Mr. Obama or whoever runs against him is getting closer to the minimum 270 electoral votes to become president, instead of counting total citizen votes from all states combined?

To get some idea of the accuracy of my perception of hearing almost nothing about abolishing the electoral college, in mid-October, 2010 I searched for the phrase “abolish electoral college” (without quotes), using Google’s new “Instant Search” feature. When I completed typing the word “abolish”, none of the 10 predictions was “electoral college”, but as soon as I typed the “e” starting “electoral”, the first line said “abolish electoral college”. Google said that there were “about 47,500 results” for that search query phrase. Yes that’s not tiny in absolute terms, yet see how that compares to the number of results for very frequently searched-for phrases: 31,200,000 results for “lose weight fast”, 53,900,000 results for “cheap car insurance” and 634,000,000 results for “Obama” (all without quotes). The first page of results for “abolish electoral college” showed that in the past 10 years the proposal to abolish the electoral college has had at least two supporters in the Senate and also some in the House of Representatives. These proposals were made very soon after presidential elections and then nothing resulted from them.

The electoral college is an outdated system that is clearly unfair to presidential candidates and also to citizen voters. It degrades the vote of each individual citizen. One major benefit of abolishing the electoral college is the possibility that presidential candidates might stop devoting most of their campaigning time to the most populous states that have close to equal sentiment for the two major parties at the expense of states where a large majority of registered voters have indicated a clear preference to vote for a certain candidate, since each individual citizen’s vote would carry equal weight.

American politics is starting to get interesting. Barack Obama has been in office for over a year, and the wave of euphoria that won him the election has dissipated. People are now thinking ahead to the 2012 Presidential election. Will Obama win a second term? Will he want a second term? If he neither stands nor wins in 2012, who is going to replace him?

To answer some of these questions, we can turn to star sign astrology. We can look at the star signs of the forty-three US Presidents, and see whether some are more frequent than others. We can also explore the controversial issue of whether one can tell a good President from their star sign.

As far as frequency is concerned, the average amount of Presidents per sign is just over three and a half. We therefore have three levels of frequency: low, average and high. Having looked at the counts for each sign, the range is between two and five Presidents. So there have been four Leo Presidents, namely Benjamin Harrison, Herbert Hoover, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Low frequency signs are where only two US Presidents had the sign. Average frequency is three or four; high frequency is five.

The low frequency signs are Aries, Gemini and Virgo. It’s perhaps not surprising that so few Aries people have made it to the White House – the last Aries President was John Tyler, who was in office from 1841 to 1845. To succeed in politics you need to compromise, and Aries politicians can be too assertive for their own good.

However to get to the top of their profession politicians need to have a high degree of self-belief and too much doubting can be very destructive. This is perhaps why there have been so few Gemini or Virgo Presidents. These two signs are ruled by Mercury, and this planet is very much associated with thinking and analysing. And sometimes Mercury analyses things too much, to the extent where it has second thoughts about everything.

The average frequency signs are Taurus, Cancer, Leo, Libra, Sagittarius, Capricorn and Pisces. The high frequency signs are Scorpio and Aquarius.

Scorpios can be effective politicians because they have a powerful intuition, and they tend to have a natural understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of their enemies. At the same time they have strong desires, and they don’t allow anything to get in their way. Having said that, there hasn’t been a Scorpio President for some time – the last Scorpio in the White House was Warren Harding, who was President from 1921 to 1923.

Yet in recent years two Scorpios have got reasonably close to the White House. Scorpio Michael Dukakis was beaten by Gemini George Bush Senior in the 1988 Presidential election. Twenty years later Scorpio Hillary Clinton was thwarted by Leo Barack Obama in a heated race for the Democrat nomination.

I would guess that Aquarians are successful in politics because they’re independent-minded. This can very often be a disadvantage, but there are times in history when the voters are looking for something different and perhaps revolutionary. I now come to the question of which sign makes the best Presidents, and arguably the answer is Aquarius. Abraham Lincoln, who ended slavery, and who led the Union to victory during the Civil War, was an Aquarian.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, who brought America out of the Great Depression, and who led the country during the Second World War, was also an Aquarian. Then there’s Aquarian Ronald Reagan. Personally I don’t regard him as being a great President, but there’s no denying that he stood up for America’s interests and played a big role in defeating Communism. I should make it clear, though, that I’m judging success in terms of the wider collective. On an individual level the success of Aquarian Presidents is usually incomplete, because they seldom get to enjoy a happy retirement.

Of the five Aquarian Presidents, four died in office. Franklin D. Roosevelt died of a stroke in 1945, William McKinley was assassinated, and so was Abraham Lincoln. America’s first Aquarian president, William Harrison, caught a cold and died, shortly after his inauguration. This means that Ronald Reagan was the only Aquarian President to retire. Even then, he came within a whisker of being assassinated, when in 1981, during an assassination attempt, he was shot in the lung.