I don't know who needs to hear this, but no argument in favor of the electoral college today has any relationship to the reasons the electoral college was written into the constitution in 1787, and the electoral college has never—not one time—functioned as intended.

In the only elections that came anywhere close to resembling the original constitutional vision for presidential elections, there was no nationwide popular vote at all.

By the way, this applies to claims that the electoral college exists because the founders were skeptical of democracy, too. The electoral college was a decision-making punt, not a carefully designed system to limit democratic participation.

If the key object of the electoral college were to limit democracy, several mechanisms that would have accomplished that more effectively were considered and rejected.

The electoral college was designed as it was because the founders couldn't agree on any of the fundamental principles of how to choose a president except that it should somehow involve calm, independent, rational deliberation. Which is not an actual plan.

The founders, in their supposedly divine wisdom, created a system in which they literally didn't specify whether presidential elections would or would not involve people voting.

So the only clear criterion for whether the electoral college worked as originally intended was whether it permitted a wise *nonpartisan* (the founders were quite clear about that part) deliberation that resulted in choosing a president and vice president.

The only presidential election that could plausibly be described that way was the very first, and that was possible only because no deliberation was actually required to elect George Washington by acclamation.

If you believe Alexander Hamilton's (dubious) account in Federalist 68, designing the electoral college went like this:

—"We should consult the sense of the people, but putting every voter in one big giant room means tumult and disorder!"

—"What if we made the room … smaller?"

This was, apparently, considered just ridiculous enough to work.