Electoral College – Time to Kill It?

Why was the Electoral College established? As our nation changed, has it become obsolete? 
These questions take on a particular poignancy since we just went through a presidential election, where one candidate received 2 million more votes than the other, yet lost. Why did our Founding Fathers ever devise such a tortured system to accomplish what could so simply be realized by adding up the people’s votes?
To get at the answers, let’s examine the circumstances they were having to address. These men were faced with the challenge of trying to unite 13 very diverse, former British colonies into one country. To get our hands around that enormous task, think about the Wildwoods, which logic would tell us should be one city. As it is, four different communities occupy two islands, only seven miles in length, which could be so much more efficiently run as a unit, but despite the best efforts of talented people over the years, remain separate.
Now assign yourself that task of joining 13 very diverse colonies spread all the way from Maine down to Georgia. How did they accomplish this impossible task? Purely by crafting a system which accommodated the varied needs of those involved. Imagine now that you are sitting in Philadelphia, representing the enormous and prosperous commonwealth of Virginia, trying to convince the representative from tiny Rhode Island that we should all have one federal government wherein representation was based on population alone.
His answer would be, “No, you would swallow us up; how would we make our ideas, our ways of thinking, and our needs felt? We would be drowned out.” As we know, what they came up with was a Congress (The House) based upon population, and the Senate, where every colony (state) had the same representation.
Okay, but what about a leader (president), how would he or she be selected? They agreed to combine the total number of representatives in the House and in the Senate to create an Electoral College to select the president. It worked, and the Constitution was drafted and ratified.
That was two centuries ago; what about today? Is it not time to throw off that construction and just go to the popular vote? Americans have to decide that issue. In doing so, we should ask ourselves the basic questions they faced then. If you were from the tiny, mountainous state of Vermont, would you be willing to elect the president based upon the popular vote and give up the Electoral College? Remember, in the College; you have three votes against California’s 55; in the popular vote system, you would have the rough equivalent of one vote against California’s 53.
You would lose two-thirds of your voting power, but California would lose virtually none of its (55 down to 53). Would you say, well, we are less diverse now than we were then, so we would not mind the large states speaking for us? My notion is you don’t think that. In fact, the coal miners, factory workers, religious groups and myriad others from the 30 states which voted for Donald Trump clearly spoke, telling the 20 predominately larger states which went for Hillary Clinton, they don’t want the populous states to speak for them.
As an aside, if we were to say we don’t need the Electoral College, are we also saying that we don’t need the Senate? If diversity doesn’t matter to us any more, why do we give Vermont’s 626,000 people equal representation to California’s 39 million?
All of this recent discussion of the Electoral College underscores the value of teaching history to our children. They are blessed to live in our great nation; an understanding of our roots will help them to realize just how blessed. 
Art Hall 
Quote from the Bible:  Be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves. Matthew 10:16