Electoral College

Many people have heard of the electoral college, but what is it?  What is the purpose?  Why is it used?
These are all questions I hope to answer and share my opinion of the reason why we do not have a direct election for the most important position in the Federal Government.
A lot of this information is readily available on the archives website for the United States Government by the way so I would definitely research for yourself.
The Electoral College is written into the Constitution by the Founding Fathers to assure fairness in voting for the President of the United States.  It is a process by which the citizens of the country elect the electors and the electors then vote in the General Election.  The system can be somewhat biased however, if 51% of the electors vote for on nominee and 49% cast their ballot for the opposing nominee, the individual who scraped 51% takes all the votes in all states except Nebraska who splits the votes according to percent.
Each state is allotted the same number of electors as they have in both houses of congress.  Obviously this changes from year to year but population rarely changes in states enough to change the apportionment in congress so as we know California, Texas, and New York have large amounts of influence.
I would like to know how this is perceived as fair.  If a candidate is able to get 49% of the votes, he should be allotted those votes in the final count.  Nebraska is the ONLY state that does this and it seems that they understand equality in voting and the importance of each vote mattering and being counted.  Why then are hundreds of votes thrown out each year to produce results that are less than fair according to vote itself.  By just looking at the 3 big states mentioned previously (California: Obama-61 McCain-37, Texas: Obama-44 McCain-56, and New York: Obama-62 McCain-37*) would have changed the winning number from a landslide to closer race than originally thought.  Indiana for example sent all 11 of the electoral votes to Obama despite the fact that he only received 50% of those with McCain receiving 49%.  Does that seem fair?  No, it does not and I would suggest more research be done on the effects of the Electoral College to possibly make changes or adopt Nebraska's model.
*This numbers were from the NPR website on the 2008 electoral map page.