The electoral college is a failure. The Founding Fathers would probably agree.

The electoral college was adopted to serve as an alternative to Congress in the presidential election process, spread out among the states and with no members of Congress allowed to serve in the body. To win election, a candidate would have to win a majority of electoral votes, and if that failed to occur, Congress would ultimately decide who among the candidates receiving votes would become president.

In fact, most delegates thought the latter scenario would be the norm, with the electoral college “nominating” the five most worthy candidates so that Congress could select a president from that group. One delegate, George Mason, predicted that Congress would be deciding the president “nineteen times out of twenty.” Antifederalist Paper No. 72 claimed that the electoral college settling on a president was “not likely to happen twice in the same century.”…

The electoral college did not succeed in warding off the creation of “cabals” — better known today as political parties. And as the 2016 election showed, foreign powers have been very happy to try to manipulate the election, and the current version of the electoral college did nothing to limit such behavior.