The EC was carefully thought out as a means of indirectly electing a President. The original ideas was that electors were elected by the people or the legislatures of the several states, the Electoral College met, and elected the President (or didn’t and the House of Representatives got to).
The state-by-state winner-take-all wasn’t carefully thought out, but the result of popular pressure to have electors picked by the people rather than the legislature, the rise of parties fielding slates of electors commited to their party’s candidate, and strategizing by the party in control of the state legislatures (based on the assumption that the voters who elected them will favor their party at the Presidential level) to maximize their supporter’s influence.
Nebraska and Maine, as I already noted, haven’t accepted this last strategizing, and I think their approach is closer to the Founders original intent, or at least as close as one can get in the presence of a two-party system. If California adopted the same approach, I think a fair number of other states might follow suit, and on balance, I think it would be good for the country.
Hmmmm — there is a lot I do not know about the EC. What I do know, however, is that it was set up to guarantee that the most populous cities would not run the show, but that smaller rural areas would have equality. AND it was to guarantee that we would NOT have a democracy, where everyone has one vote. Because ‘the most popular’ is not always the best for all, and often mediocre at best.
I am really wary of changes in the system that move it more towards a straight democracy; conformity and mob-think are very strong attractions to the human heart, and we need checks and balances all the way down the line.
Also, the Law of Unintended Consequences is a very strong force, kind of like gravity. Things that sound really great, which are often seen as ‘it will be a great improvement,’ many times prove to be disasters.
This new system, to me, sounds like straight democracy without the checks and balances of small states vs big states, etc. Hilary, I know, has been blabbing about doing away with the EC. This might well be one step towards that.