Yes, the electoral college was a stroke of absolute genius. Yet I have highly intelligent friends who have no clue as to the rationale for the electoral college and think it's "unfair" that the election isn't decided by popular vote.
I can think of lots of good reasons for the electoral college.
It requires broad support across the country rather than allowing the most populous areas to dominate the elections. That was true in 1788 and is true today. A lot of people think it was a compromise between the free states and the slave states. This ignores the fact that at the time of ratification, Massachusetts was the only free state. Pennsylvania had banned it but grandfathered it allowing current slaveowners to keep the slaves they had. In the north, they called them indentured servants but it's pretty much the same thing. Ben Franklin owned two. Most northern states did not ban slavery until the 19th century.
The small population states didn't want the large states dictating who the president would be. Adding the two senators to the formula for deciding how many electoral votes each state gets skews the math in favor of the smaller states. It triples the electoral votes of all the states with just one representative in the House but only adds about 4% to California's total. That's a good thing.
It compartmentalizes the voting process which helps in the event of a recount. If we had a direct popular vote and had a national election similarly close to what Florida was in 2000 can you imagine the chaos? If the national popular vote was decided by a few thousands votes, both major parties would be lawyering up to recount every vote from Key West to Point Barrow. It took five weeks to decide the 2000 election which recounted just one state. It could take years if we had to recount the entire nation.
Any institution that kept Al Gore and Hillary Clinton from becoming POTUS should be preserved.
Love it or hate it. The electoral college is hear to stay. There's no way 38 states are going to agree to ratify a constitutional amendment to get rid of it. There was an attempt a few years back to end run the Constitution by states forming a consortium to award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. The provision would only kick in once enough states joined the consortium to create an electoral college majority. A number of states adopted the resolution but not nearly enough to form a majority.
