The system we eventually arrived at shouldn’t be thought of as a brilliant encapsulation of the founders’ wisdom; it was a compromise reluctantly and wearily arrived at, nobody having been able to come up with anything better. If you have ever sat in a long meeting as day care pickup got nearer and nearer, knowing you couldn’t go home until the meeting produced a policy document everyone there could make themselves grumblingly sign, you have a pretty good idea of how the Electoral College came to be.
