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The electoral college was necessary because it would have been logistically impossible for people living in 18th and 19th century America to be able to participate in a single-day one person one vote election, given their level of technology at the time.

We live in the 21st century. We have instantaneous means of communication via the internet making designating an elector to travel to Washington unnecessary, a greatly expanded infrastructure via roads and mass transit for people to travel to polling places in a reasonable amount of time in a day, computers that can tally the ballots many hundreds of times faster than a human being can, and vastly expanded capacity for handling the logistics of running a nationwide election including a complex bureaucracy dedicated to oversight and enforcement of voting laws and regulations.

The electoral college is an archaic system whose only purpose has been completely supplanted by modern technology. Any notion of rogue electors defending the republic from authoritarians and populists is not only historically false, but given the fact that they failed to prevent exactly that situation from happening once already, laughably ineffective.

The electoral college exists because the founding fathers didn't want normal people voting for president. The whole point is to isolate people from directly choosing a president.

I don't think this is true. The commonly cited reference is James Madison's Federalist Paper No. 10, I'll provide the relevant excerpt and a Wikipedia link, though I'll urge caution as they aren't authoritative sources by any means. Bolding is mine.

Preamble

Federalist No. 10 continues a theme begun in Federalist No. 9 and is titled "The Utility of the Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection". The whole series is cited by scholars and jurists as an authoritative interpretation and explication of the meaning of the Constitution. Historians such as Charles A. Beard argue that No. 10 shows an explicit rejection by the Founding Fathers of the principles of direct democracy and factionalism, and argue that Madison suggests that a representative republic is more effective against partisanship and factionalism.

Cherry-picked quote cited by Garry Wills

Garry Wills is a noted critic of Madison's argument in Federalist No. 10. In his book Explaining America, he adopts the position of Robert Dahl in arguing that Madison's framework does not necessarily enhance the protections of minorities or ensure the common good. Instead, Wills claims: "Minorities can make use of dispersed and staggered governmental machinery to clog, delay, slow down, hamper, and obstruct the majority. But these weapons for delay are given to the minority irrespective of its factious or nonfactious character; and they can be used against the majority irrespective of its factious or nonfactious character. What Madison prevents is not faction, but action. What he protects is not the common good but delay as such".

EDIT: Here's where I first heard of the argument that the US is not a democracy (in the sense it's thought of by everyday use, as opposed to the Greek which involves the concept of demos. He's a Marxist, thought it might be relevant and wouldn't want to waste your time only to figure it out later.

EDIT EDIT: I didn't even make my point, whoops. I think the founding fathers were not unaware of the current state of affairs of the electoral college being probsble, rather it was included by design.