Excerpt:
"The Founders were too smart, too well read in history, too aware of the complications and geographical diversity in the United States, and respectful of the federal system, to embrace something as crude and unsustainable as direct democracy.

Under such a system, the large population centers would dominate everyone else, and result in the worst excesses of mob rule.

The purpose of the Electoral College is to provide a fairer weighting between the states, which were seen as the primary political jurisdictions in the U.S. system. The federal government had defined roles and defined limits while everything else was left to the states. The U.S. president needs to represent the whole and therefore the states would serve as an essential buffer.

This is why the United States is a republic on the old Roman model and not a democracy of the form that Aristotle said can only work in small homogenous territories. A direct democracy in which the popular vote elected the president would disenfranchise all small states and, within them, everyone who lived outside the large population centers. Essentially five or so of the most populous cities would elect the president and there would be no reason to campaign anywhere else.

In other words, anyone arguing for the abolition of the Electoral College is very plainly arguing for a one-party state forever, with elections as nothing other than a veneer on top of it.

Anyone who moved from one of America’s Gothams to get peace and quiet, run a small business or start a family, or simply wants to raise a family and be left alone, would essentially surrender all political rights. He would then be subject to tyrannical control forever by the mobs and masses left behind in the population centers."