Why do we have the Electoral College?

We have the Electoral College in the United States because the men who wrote the Constitution feared democracy.  They did not want to give the people too much direct power over the government.  One way they limited the people’s power was by preventing them from directly electing the president.

At the time that the Constitution was written, most educated people distrusted the idea of democracy.  There had never been a democratic country in modern times and even the Athenians and Romans were not truly democratic.  The Framers of the Constitution read philosophers like Plato, who emphasized that democracy was a bad form of government because it allowed a mass of people, most of whom knew nothing about running a country, to rule. They felt that democracy would inevitably collapse, or would turn into tyranny as ignorant people elected a demagogue to rule them. 

Because the Framers distrusted the idea of democracy, they tried to limit the degree to which the US would be democratic.  If we consider the presidency, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Supreme Court to be the four main parts of government, the Framers only allowed the people to elect one part directly.  The people got to elect the members of the House, but Senators were to be chosen by state legislatures, the president by the Electoral College, and Supreme Court justices by the president and the Senate.  The Electoral College was simply one way of insulating the government from the people so our system would not be excessively (in the Framers’ minds) democratic.

But why do we still have the Electoral College now that we no longer fear democracy?  The main reason is that the small states would not agree to change the Constitution to do away with it.  The Electoral College makes each state relevant as an entity, not just as a group of people.  It gives small states more power in the presidential voting because it gives them a disproportionate number of electors.    For example, California has more than 70 times as many people as Wyoming, but only about 18 times more electoral votes.  Because the Electoral College makes small states more important than their population size would warrant, those states would be unwilling to ratify a constitutional amendment to do away the College.