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Well thank you for being so gracious. You’re not confused, I am. I got my Constitutional Convention arguments mixed up. Here is what the constitution said,

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.

I don’t know* the portion of states that used a popular vote as the “Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct” but it wasn’t zero, I think. Of course, it quickly became per the popular vote with the possible exception of Massachusetts today.

I will defend my befuddled thinking by saying that the framers did intend the President to be popularly elected but apparently that intention was compromised upon.

* - Okay, I Googled this:

An early method of choosing electors was selection by the state legislature. A majority of the states legislatively selected presidential electors in both 1792 and 1800, and half of the states did so in 1812.[51] One reason most U.S. history textbooks don’t start reporting the national aggregate popular vote until the election of 1824 is because more than a quarter of all the states used legislative choice in all prior elections; there simply was no popular vote for President in those states. Even in 1824, when Andrew Jackson lost in spite of having pluralities of both the popular and electoral votes, a full quarter of the states (6 of 24) did not hold popular elections for President and Vice President;[52] instead, those six state legislatures choose the electors that year. By 1828, only Delaware and South Carolina continued to use legislative choice.[52]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_States)

“More than a quarter” - I would assume this means less than a half and probably less than a third.