The EC came about die to several compromises during the Constitutional Convention. The first thing to understand is how the people of the individual states viewed the concept of a "state" in those days. After over 200 years we tend to automatically think of a state as a subdivision of a country, and that's what it has come to mean, however a secondary definition of "state" is: "a nation or territory considered as an organized political community under one government, e.g. Germany, Italy and other European states". The second definition was the prevailing one in 1787 - the thirteen states viewed themselves as functionally independent nations held together in a confederation or alliance. This view didn't really go away until well after the Civil War. So, during the Constitutional Convention, rather than thinking of themselves as "Americans", they held themselves as "Virginians", "New Yorkers" or "Marylanders" and were very jealous of their rights as individual states in relation to other states. The states with lower populations were concerned that they would be consistently outvoted by the more populous states in the Congress, so the compromise that gave us a population-based House of Representatives and an equal representation Senate was arrived at. In addition, the notorious "three-fifths" compromise allowed enslaved people to be counted as three-fifths of a person for census purposes. The Southern slave states had actually wanted to fully count the enslaved people to increase their voting power while the non-slave states did not want to count them at all. When it came time to decide how the president would be elected, the system was based partially on this legislative compromise.
The writers of the Constitution did not trust "the people". In fact, "the people" in general couldn't vote - only white, male, landowners could. But even within that group, the founders wanted a fail-safe against voters who might make the 'wrong' choices. The "people" wouldn't really be the ones who would vote for president, but a group of electors who would theoretically cast their votes for whoever received the most votes within their states, but in practical terms, could vote for whoever they wanted to. The number of electors from each state was based upon the total of members of Congress, including the two senators, so the proportion of electors would tilt somewhat toward the smaller states.
A provision not found in the Constitution, but nevertheless followed in every state except Maine and Nebraska, is to award all of a state's electoral votes to the winner of the most votes in that state, effectively disenfranchising voters for the minority party candidate in states where the voters overwhelmingly support one party.
One of the things that EC proponents bring up is that without it, the voters in the smaller states would have no voice and that elections would be decided either by New York and California or by a dozen or so big cities. This is not a strong argument:
* The states no longer view themselves as sovereign nations with unique rights that need to be protected. While there are regional differences, most issues that come before a president are common issues to all Americans.
* With the current system small states already are ignored in an election campaign. Also ignored are voters in "safe" states like California and New York, which vote reliably Democratic and most of the states of the Deep South which vote reliably Republican. The states that get attention are the so-called wing states, states that are so evenly split between Republican and Democratic that they could go either way in an election.
* The above argument ignores the fact that the more populous states do not vote as a block, and neither do the big cities. Arguing that California and New York would decide elections assumes that everyone in those states would vote the same way when in reality there are many conservative Republicans in upstate New York and northern California, just as there are liberal Democrats in Lincoln and Omaha Nebraska and in Atlanta Georgia, even though those states usually vote for and award all their electoral votes to Republicans.
A weird non sequitur-ish argument is "We're a Republic". This is a variation on the recurring right-wing insistence that we're not a Democracy, conflating direct democracy (i.e. "mob rule") with what our government is: a Democratic Republic, or a Republican Democracy. Democracy is perfectly accurate as a shorthand description. The "We're a Republic" crowd has gotten it into their heads that a necessary feature of a republican form of government (which boils down to "not a monarchy") is something like an electoral college and equal representation to political subdivisions. The writers of the Constitution decided it would be a feature of our government, but there's plenty of republics that don't use any such system.
Another non-argument rests on the belief that the founders were infallibly wise in the way they set up the framework of our government and that we shouldn't question it. This ignores history. Originally senators were chosen, not by a vote of the people, but by state governments. This was changed. Originally the president and vice-president were not tied together as "running mates". The person with the second-most electoral votes became the Vice President. This was changed after several deadlocked elections ended up being decided by the House of Representatives. The "wisdom" of the founders was subject to change when it didn't work out as envisioned.
In the real world there's no way that the EC will be done away with. It would take a Constitutional amendment, and a party whose candidate won would have no motivation to support such a change. What can change is how electors are allocated. Nebraska and Maine both award two electoral votes to the statewide winner and one vote each to the winners within a Congressional district. There's no reason that this couldn't work nationwide. States could also apportion their electoral votes on a percentage basis, although I don't know of there's any provision for fractional votes. Several states are even now part of a "popular vote compact" where they agree to award all of their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote once the electoral votes of the compact states reach a certain threshold (270 electoral votes).
Changing the way electoral votes are awarded within the states would still address the concern that small states not be overwhelmed by the more populous states, but would eliminate (or at least minimize) the possibility that the runner-up be declared the winner in a presidential election.
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