The Electoral College may have made sense when election results had to be delivered via Pony Express.

Anyway, it was also supposed to be a safeguard against electing a lunatic by having wise and learned men of good ethics and morals keep populist mob rule and foreign intrigue in check.

Or, as Alexander Hamilton put it:

It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.

...It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder.

...Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one quarter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union? But the convention have guarded against all danger of this sort, with the most provident and judicious attention.

So, how's that working out for us?

It was designed to do what it's doing.

Read Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880, a history of the Reconstruction era by W. E. B. Du Bois, first published in 1935.

I see where there are problems with the EC.

I also see where going to total popular vote means that a whole bunch of states, including Tennessee, are largely meaningless except for fundraising.

The EC gives each state some meaning.

Maybe there is something between the current EC and the straight popular vote.

Not sure we, as a country, are anywhere near where we could approve a constitutional amendment anyway. We are so damn divided.