How far can it go? [presidential race] Who knows. Until then, how about some fiction?

[Chemyst]

The will of what people? Wyoming electors should recast their votes because the will of their people doesn't match the will of the people of Vermont?

The Electoral College reflects the will of the people, and is designed to temper the weight of the populous States.

I'm not a Trump supporter, but I do believe in the principles of the Constitution.

Hey dneal,

You're about half-way there.

The "principles of the Constitution" you are supporting are some of the left-over bits that went along with some state's residents not having the vote but counting as 3/5th of a person for population purposes. The Electoral College was an important compromise in order to get the Constitution ratified two centuries ago, but it never got revisited or updated when the US decided to broaden the voting pool in subsequent years.

You're correct that in the 18th century there was a real concern by Southern agricultural states in the US that in a popular vote they would never achieve a majority and they'd see their institutions and way of life threatened, especially with regards to slave ownership. As giving the vote to slaves was a total non-starter, compromises were developed that based political institutions on population instead of voter enrollment. One of these compromises was every state getting to send two Senators, selected by the state legislature, to form the upper house of Congress. Another was counting slaves as 3/5th of a person, increasing the state population numbers for Representative seats. The Electoral College, as a sort of meta-compromise, took both of these compromises (2 Senators/state and Representatives based on population) and made selection of the President of the United States dependent on those numbers and not a straight popular vote, which at the time would be heavily weighted towards the Northeast.

Certainly, this is an effective compromise if your entering assumption is that only white men are fit to vote, but your white male population is unevenly distributed across state boundaries and you need to unify those states.

It is a bit harder to justify nowadays when all citizens get the vote. For instance:
-California has around 18,000,000 registered voters and gets 55 Electoral College electors.
-Vermont has around 300,000 registered voters and gets 3 Electoral College electors.
-In CA each elector represents over 300,000 voters but in VT each elector represents only 100,000 voters.
-Are VT voters three-times the citizen of voters in CA?