The purpose of the Electoral College, as designed by the framers of the Constitution, is (1) to deny the people the power to choose the president directly, (2) to confer that power instead on the several states, and (3) to deliberately ballast the electoral power in favor of less populous states.
Only members of the House of Representatives are said in the original Constitution to be “chosen by the people” [1.2.1]. Senators were originally to be chosen in each state “by the legislature thereof” [1.3.1] (superseded by the Seventeenth Amendment to “elected by the people thereof” [XVII.1]).
Presidential electors, by contrast, are simply appointed by each state “in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct” [2.1.2]. It so happens that every state today chooses its electors by popular vote, but it need not necessarily do so; they could pick random names out of the voter rolls, or just let the governor name the electors, or any other “manner” they choose, so long as they so direct in advance, and not after the fact because the legislators don’t like the election results.
The fact remains that the Electoral College is intended by design to deny the direct election of the president by the people. It is also a fact that the overweighting of smaller states—by adding in two more electoral votes representing their senators, in addition to the (population-proportional) size of their House delegation—was consciously intended as a concession to the slave-holding southern states, without which they would have refused to join the Union at all.
Whether these are good reasons for keeping the contraption is a matter of opinion. Our friend Mr. Jimenez appears to think they are; I believe I can safely say that a majority of Americans think they are not, by the same logic that led to the Seventeenth Amendment on direct election of senators. But we’re stuck with it, because the byzantine mechanism for amending the Constitution makes it politically impossible to change.
