Three common arguments for preserving the Electoral College – and why they're wrong

On a date set by Congress, state legislatures would choose a set of electors who would later convene in their respective state capitals to cast votes for president.

Because there were no political parties back then, it was assumed that electors would use their best judgment to choose a president.

There have been scattered faithless electors in past elections, but they’ve never influenced the outcome of a presidential election.

Since winner-take-all laws began in the 1820s, electors have rarely acted independently or against the wishes of the party that chose them.

[...] despite the best efforts of some Clinton voters to get them to switch sides, there’s no evidence that some electors may consider voting for someone like Paul Ryan to prevent a Trump majority and throw the election into the U.S. House of Representatives.

Since 2000, a popular argument for the electoral college made on conservative websites and talk radio is that without the Electoral College, candidates would spend all their time campaigning in big cities and would ignore low-population areas.

[...] it does just the opposite.

Some have advocated continuation of the Electoral College because its winner-take-all nature at the state level causes the media and the public to see many close elections as landslides, thereby giving a stronger mandate to govern for the winning candidate.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan won 51 percent of the national popular vote but 91 percent of the electoral vote, giving the impression of a landslide victory and allowing him to convince Congress to approve parts of his agenda.

Created by Stanford University computer science professor John Koza, the idea is to award each state’s electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote instead of the winner of the state popular vote.

[...] these states are all strongly Democratic, and there seems to be no support for the change yet among the majority of states controlled by Republicans.

Because Republicans won the two recent presidential elections where the electoral college winner differed from the national popular vote winner, many party supporters have defended the Electoral College as a way to preserve the role of rural (usually Republican) voters in presidential elections.