Hallo, in my opinion, the electoral college has two advantages to the popular vote.
First: It gives more power to the voters in smaller states. [In the USA, the Senate is significantly stronger than the House of Representatives. For example: To appoint a Cabinet member or some other federal officer, the President needs the approval of the Senate, but not of the House of Representatives. Therefore, a deadlock between the President and the Senate would be more harmful than a deadlock between the President and the House of Representatives. Therefore, it makes sense to elect the President in a manner that corresponds more to the election of the Senate than to the election of the House of Representatives.] Second: It makes it possible that the elections are run by the governments of the individual states and don't have to be run by the central government. [Currently, to guarantee that the Equal Protection Clause is fulfilled, it is only necessary to guarantee that all the voters within the same state are treated equally. A popular vote would make it necessary that also all the voters across the USA are treated equally. This would mean that also the regulations on eligibility, absentee ballots, early voting, voting machines, opening hours of the polling stations etc. would have to be harmonized across the USA.] ********* In section 8 of the current version (3 November 2008) of my paper, I explain how the electoral college should be combined with Condorcet voting: http://m-schulze.webhop.net/schulze1.pdf The basic ideas are: 1. Each voter gets a complete list of all candidates and ranks these candidates in order of preference. The individual voter may give the same preference to more than one candidate and he may keep candidates unranked. 2. For each pair of candidates A and B separately, we determine how many electoral votes Elect[A,B] candidate A would get and how many electoral votes Elect[B,A] candidate B would get when only these two candidates were running. To determine the final winner, we apply a Condorcet method to the matrix Elect[X,Y]. 3. To calculate Elect[A,B] and Elect[B,A], the electoral votes of a state should be distributed to candidate A and candidate B in proportion of the number of voters who strictly prefer candidate A to candidate B and the number of voters who strictly prefer candidate B to candidate A. Markus Schulze ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info