Lately, there has been a push to get rid of the Electoral College — the way we choose presidents — and replace it with a pure popular vote.

Governor Carcieri recently vetoed one such plan called the National Popular Vote, which former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis has been pushing hard. In 1969, President Richard Nixon similarly sought to deep-six the protections afforded by the Electoral College.

Before citizens jump on the bandwagon, they would be wise to consider what the Founders were trying to do in creating what has turned out to be the most successful federal, not unitary, republic in history.

They worked hard to devise a government that would tend to protect the liberties of minorities (except tragically, most notably, the African-American population for many years). They understood that majority rule unmitigated by checks and balances historically marked the path to dictatorship and tyranny. They also sought to retain a system in which the states would maintain much importance as political and governmental entities. That was a way to keep government close to the people, and what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis later called great “laboratories of democracy,” able to try different policies, the best of which could be emulated by other states.

The Electoral College system, which seems so crankily 18th Century, is an important and ingenious part of our federal system. It turns the presidential race into 50 separate state races (plus the District of Columbia).

The virtues of this quintessentially federal system are manifold:

• Similar to the U.S. Senate, it gives smaller states (such as Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut) disproportionate power (more electoral votes per capita than more populous states such as California and Texas). That makes it harder for big states to steamroll over smaller states’ interests.

• It protects the rights of rural states, which could otherwise be a mere afterthought. The Founders believed that the values inculcated in rural America were an important part of the country’s fabric.

• It promotes the interests of ethnic minorities, such as blacks and Hispanics, since they can have a strong influence in state races that they would not have if presidential elections were purely national popularity contests.

• It forces candidates to take on a more national perspective and thus usually more moderate policies than they otherwise would. Were a pure-popular-vote system installed, a candidate could theoretically roll up huge vote totals in one state or a small region, lose throughout the rest of the country, and still win.

• It makes it easier to limit the effect of corruption. If corrupt voting practices let a candidate roll up a huge majority in one place, the Electoral College would tend to wall off the effect to that one state.

No system is perfect, of course, and the Electoral College sometimes — though very rarely — does defy the will of the common majority. It did in 2000, when George Bush narrowly lost the popular vote but won the electoral votes of 30 of the 50 states, albeit controversially when the Supreme Court ruled for Mr. Bush regarding recounting the Florida vote.

But the experience of the last 219 years suggests strongly that the system has usually (nothing is always in the affairs of people) worked well to protect Americans and their liberty. It should not be tossed aside casually.