I hope this won’t make me sound like a fan of George W. Bush, but here goes anyway. I am sick of columnists and others reminding us that Al Gore won the"popular vote.” It’s irrelevant! (See Maureen Dowd for an example.) If the national popular vote had mattered, Bush could have run up his margins in Texas and his other safe states. But he didn’t because it would have been wasted time and money. Why? Because the Constitution set up the Electoral College. For the benefit of the Gore fans, what counts is how many state electoral votes a candidate wins, not how many votes cast by citizens. You get a state’s electoral votes even if you win the state’s popular vote by a margin of one. The Gore fans’ nattering is equivalent to claiming your team really won the World Series because although it lost four games, it scored more runs overall than the other team. Give it up, Gore fans. You’re only showing your ignorance.