About the origins of the Electoral College, several observations:

The United States was not designed to be, nor is, nor ever was a democracy. The United States is a republic. In a republic the people vote for representatives who actually do the governing. The Electoral College is a republican (small r) institution.

Our system of selecting public officials, with all its faults--and there's a lot of them as actually practiced --has worked pretty well for over two hundred years, and I say it would be foolish to change this feature, to make it inconsistent with the basic republican (small r) nature of our government. There's no telling what kind of troubles might come out of a changed system.

Dave Oesterreich