As long as states retain the "winner take all" element, then the Electoral College is working at least partially as intended. People in Kalifornia, for example, can steal as many Kalifornia votes as they want and it won't change the outcome of any election in which the majority of Kalifornians support the thieves.
To enlarge their advantage over what it would be anyway, Kalifornia would have to arrange to steal votes in Wyoming, or Connecticut, or Arizona. It's not impossible, but it makes the vote stealing more difficult.
I don't think our Founders ever dreamed of how rapid and pervasive our communication systems would become. They were enlightened men but even we would find it difficult to see what will happen two centuries from today.
I don’t think our founders ever dreamed that this country would elect a rapist or an illegal alien to the presidency, but the democrats have done both in the last couple decades.
Any faith I used to have in the system is gone. It’ll take some huge positive changes for me to even consider this governmental system worth saving. As it is, I wouldn’t much care if Washington DC got nuked during a joint session of congress. Nearly all of them are crooked jackholes that aren’t worth the moisture in my spit. Sure, there are still a couple of decent people trying to make things better, but that’s like trying to row a canoe upstream with a teaspoon.
I disagree. You describe a beneficial aspect of the EC as it presently exists, but this was no part of the initial intent.
Under the original plan, there was no "winner take all" by state element. Electors voted as individuals, not by state. In fact, that is still the case, except as prescribed otherwise by state, not federal, law.
As others have pointed out, I believe the Founders intended the final decision to be normally made in Congress, with the EC thus functioning more often as a nominating than an electoral body. The exception would be when there was a national consensus who should be elected, as there was for the first two elections. Thereafter, the EC, in its original intent, went away.
If parties had not arisen, the EC would probably have remained, most of the time, more of a nominating convention, which would have had interesting effects on the distribution of power within the government. Hopefully, it would have helped prevent the arising of that nonsense about "three co-equal branches of government." Parties, of course, immediately narrowed the field, most of the time, to two men.
The EC still functions, but certainly not as originally intended, leaving aside that 12A drastically changed procedures.
The current state-by-state winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes maximizes the incentive and opportunity for fraud, coercion, intimidation, confusion, and voter suppression. A very few people can change the national outcome by adding, changing, or suppressing a small number of votes in one closely divided battleground state. With the current system all of a state’s electoral votes are awarded to the candidate who receives a bare plurality of the votes in each state. The sheer magnitude of the national popular vote number, compared to individual state vote totals, is much more robust against manipulation.
National Popular Vote would limit the benefits to be gained by fraud or voter suppression. One suppressed vote would be one less vote. One fraudulent vote would only win one vote in the return. In the current electoral system, one fraudulent vote could mean 55 electoral votes, or just enough electoral votes to win the presidency without having the most popular votes in the country.
The closest popular-vote election count over the last 130+ years of American history (in 1960), had a nationwide margin of more than 100,000 popular votes. The closest electoral-vote election in American history (in 2000) was determined by 537 votes, all in one state, when there was a lead of 537,179 (1,000 times more) popular votes nationwide.
For a national popular vote election to be as easy to switch as 2000, it would have to be two hundred times closer than the 1960 election—and, in popular-vote terms, forty times closer than 2000 itself.
Which system offers vote suppressors or fraudulent voters a better shot at success for a smaller effort?