This appears to be argument by very specifically defined tautology. I'm not really sure what people hope to accomplish when they take this approach https://twitter.com/shadihamid/status/1306222678311919617

Some components of the EC are the product of the constitutional drafting and ratification process in the 18th century, which was more democratic than what could occur in most contemporary countries but quite undemocratic by our standards.

The winner-take-all component that dominates how electors are chosen at the state level is the result of incentives faced by state level leadership in the context of a two party system. From the start basically no one has been happy with this outcome.

The particulars aside, defining legitimacy == democratic outcome avoids an actual confrontation with the difficulties of understanding either idea. Neither what is considered "democratic" nor what is perceived as "legitimate" can be pinned down as if mathematical.

I rarely take democratic theorists seriously, given how abstracted from actually existing democracies they usually get, but they're not wrong that the notion is much thicker than getting a simple majority of votes in a situation that is voted upon.

Legitimacy, meanwhile, is this slippery thing that smuggles in whatever political normative commitments you've already got. Shadi's argument is that only democracy is legitimate, therefore democratic outcomes are legitimate, therefore the EC, as democratic outcome, is legitimate.

That boils the entire argument of legitimacy down to whether or not something is democratic. Which, as mentioned, is difficult enough, to be sure. But if we're talking about this because a particular system is perceived as being illegitimate, it's not very helpful.

A lot of systems are perceived as being legitimate by broad cross sections of their publics, at least temporarily. Monarchies and dictatorships have, at times. And democracies have struggled to hold on to that perception. To assert a tautology is to avoid the necessary hard work.

That is, the hard work of making the case that the current system *is* legitimate, if flawed, on the basis of democratic norms as well as other values (because few people are JUST small-d democrats who will accept any and all democratic outcomes as vindicating the system).

You can't do the hard work of maintaining the perception of a tight connection between democracy and legitimacy by simply positing a tautology.