We don't get around by horses anymore nor do we live by candle light. And that is how archaic the EC is.
You should read this article, it does a pretty good job of explaining, not only how the EC works, but why. More importantly, why it is a good system.
Why We Use Electoral College, Not Popular Vote
Actually it really doesn't go into why. But we've already done this in at least three other threads so here it comes again.
(abridged from a previous post):
The EC was in fact put there to shore up slave states and
Slave Power. When the original Thirteen Colonies were coming together the slave states had enough population to dominate, but ONLY if they counted their slaves, who had no vote. So they came up with the "Three Fifths Compromise", stipulating that for the purpose of counting population, the enslaved in those states would be counted as three-fifths of a person (the South wanted them counted fully to inflate their numbers, and they "compromised" at 3/5). Of course these slaves had no vote, so in effect their state's Electors voted on their behalf, regardless of what the slaves' interests would have been.
Thus Virginia, a slave state that gave us six of our first seven Presidents who were ALL slaveowners, became the dominant force in Presidential elections -- a dominance ("Old Dominion") it would not have had ----- if not for the Electoral College. And that in turn resisted the country ever facing and addressing the Slavery question, until it finally came to a head with the Civil War.
There was also an element of regionality, that one candidate shouldn't run up the score by amassing a big vote in a limited region. But that's clearly out the window by now; just have a look at the red and blue maps we're all familiar with and you've got a checkerboard of concentrated regions so it clearly doesn't work to do that. In fact the EC is the only reason that red and blue map, and the polarization it presents, EXISTS.
Again, it's constantly dividing people. It did that in its first version with slaves; then when the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed citizenship to the ex-slaves, it proceeded to exclude women.... even though they too were counted without having the right to vote, until 1920.
Today it divides "red" states from "blue" states --- two terms which would not even exist if not for the divisive nature of the EC .... and it bestows destructive terms like "blue wall" and "flyover country". And it seasons that negativity with the blanket psychological suggestion that "the entire South votes red (unanimously)" and "The Pacific Coast votes blue (unanimously)". Neither are true, and it makes those alternative views invisible under that blanket. That only serves to
perpetuate the same divisions.
So whatever its various intentions have been, its effect has been to divide, divide and ..... what was the other one..... oh yes --- divide.