As originally conceived it’s actually a fantastic system. The drawbacks to it are mostly related to legal restrictions that states have imposed on themselves in an effort to be more democratic and changes over time in who the electors are and how beholden they are to public pressure. Were the Electoral College working as the founders intended Trump would never have been President, as when he won the popular vote in their state the electors would’ve gone “lol no” and voted for someone else

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I spent a few hours fucking around with a spreadsheet and looking at elections going back to the 90’s to see if I could understand the logic behind the electoral college The answer is no, I couldn’t find any statistical justification for the electoral college, I only started to realize how fortunate we are that it hasn’t differed dramatically from the popular vote

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It made sense at the time. It was impractical to do a popular vote, and that worked. But we have the tech to do a popular vote (they do it anyway). And a popular vote would likely encourage more voting as people would feel as though their vote matters. It should be retired, but since the system can be used to cheat I doubt it’ll happen.

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