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“I know this is radical in our day, but I believe the Founders set up a system where each congressional district voted for an elector who went to Washington and chose a president.”

No, actually, the original method was that the state legislatures selected the electors for their state, which gave the states a lot more power than they have now, which I actually think was a better method. It made for a much more balanced state/federal power structure. Gradually, more and more states went with the direct election of the electors, most states opting for a winner-take-all system for their state.

A system that allots electors by congressional districts also erodes the power of the states, but some states have gone that way. We truly do need to get back to a system in which the states have more power up against the feds.

Do you know when the States moved to winner take all? Honest question, I do not know. The Constitution provides for multiple candidates from the states.

Thanks for an excellent post, Aunt P. I did some additional looking and found the chart below at wiki. There was no popular vote for president Washington, as near as I can tell. The vote was for the electors, and, if appointed by the legislature, there was still an appointment of electors with no directions to vote a particular way that I can find.

That would make it a purely "republican" process. It was placed in the hands of the electors.

Electoral college selection

The Constitution, in Article II, Section 1, provided that the state legislatures should decide the manner in which their Electors were chosen. Different state legislatures chose different methods:^[3]

Method of choosing Electors	State(s)
each elector appointed by the state legislature	Connecticut Georgia New Jersey New York ^(a) South Carolina
two electors appointed by state legislature each remaining elector chosen by state legislature from list of top two vote-getters in each congressional district	Massachusetts
each elector chosen by voters statewide; however, if no candidate wins majority, state legislature appoints elector from top two candidates	New Hampshire
state is divided into electoral districts, with one elector chosen per district by the voters of that district	Virginia ^(b) Delaware
electors chosen at large by voters	Maryland Pennsylvania
state had not yet ratified the Constitution, so was not eligible to choose electors	North Carolina Rhode Island

^(a) New York's legislature deadlocked, so no electors were chosen.
^(b) One electoral district failed to choose an elector.