Lately it has become a meme that the purpose of the U.S. electoral college is to dilute the voting strength of large cities. I have always believed the point was that transportation and communication was difficult in the days the constitution was written, and by assigning a relatively small group of people the power to settle the presidential election in face to face discussion, expensive and time consuming national polling could be limited to a single round. Is there historical evidence as to what the framers were really thinking when they created the electoral college?
Note: This is a slightly modified version of a comment on another sub I posted a while ago.
There's a lot of discourse and beliefs as to why the electoral college was made: protecting small states, give slave states more representation, a check against the uneducated masses, etc. While all of these explanations were certainly on the minds of the framers and certainly influenced the decision in some capacity, none of them get to what actually happened during the constitutional convention. And what actually happened that caused the electoral college was a lot of bureaucracy and compromises.
In the constitutional convention, there were a couple factions: people who wanted the president elected by the people, and those who wanted him chosen by congress. People opposed to popular vote thought that the average citizen was not informed enough to make a wise vote, whereas those against congress choosing feared that this would lead to the president being subservient to the legislative branch. A committee was assigned to study and consider possible methods for choosing the president after quite a while of people offering suggestions, and had to deliver a proposal. As this was politics, there was a lot of bickering and not much progress.
At some point, someone proposed a compromise: an intermediate election though an electoral college. States would choose electors to represent them and vote, and whoever has the majority of electoral votes wins. A state’s number of electors was based on their representation in Congress, and they could allocate their electors however they wish—state legislature decides it, popular vote statewide, popular vote by district, etc.
(The size of Congress was, of course, designed to reflect this conflict of population disparity. When first discussing Congress (before the matter of choosing president came up), small states wanted everyone to have equal representation in Congress, whereas larger states wanted it to be based on the population of the state; the Connecticut Compromise created a bicameral legislature, where one chamber of Congress (the House) was based on population and the other (Senate) had equal representation from each state. Further, the infamous 3/5 compromise made it so that when determining how much representation a state had in the House, slaves counted as 3/5 of a person towards the state's whole population. Since a state's representation in the electoral college was the sum of its representatives in both chambers of Congress, they would have two electors from the senate and at least one from Congress, giving each state a minimum of three electors.)
Ultimately, the electoral college was chosen because people on the “popular vote” versus “congress chooses” debate couldn’t reach a decision, but were able to accept the intermediate option instead; it was described as the first choice of few but second choice of enough. People thought it was good enough a system, and the convention needed to move on so they just went with it. On top of that, they really thought that Washington would be the only person to receive a majority, so most of the time the state delegation the house would wind up making the decision. (What's more, they also thought that a candidate would rarely win the majority of electoral votes, and that frequently the country would use the fallback system they wrote in where the President gets chosen by a majority of state delegations in the House, and the Vice-President by state delegation in the Senate.) In the end, it was chosen not because the framers really liked it, but because they had nothing better and the deadline was approaching.
Of course, in Federalist 68 Alexander Hamilton argued in favor of the electoral college, citing reasons like how people who know the candidates and know how government works are the people that can make the best decision, and that this will stop temper demagogues seeking power. But at this point, the Constitution was already written and he was trying to persuade people to its benefits, so this doesn't necessarily demonstrate what he was thinking about the system in the moment it was made. (For reference, Hamilton had previously in the convention proposed that the president be chosen by electors and serve for life.) If someone else knows other framers' insights, that'd be cool.
I believe there are valid arguments for and against the electoral college, but I think it's an error to say that it was really designed to do anything in particular. To quote historian John Roche, “The Framers did not in their wisdom endow the United States with a College of Cardinals—the electoral college was neither an exercise in applied Platonism nor an experiment in indirect government. It was merely a jerry-rigged improvisation which has subsequently been endowed with high theoretical content.”
Main source: Electoral College Primer, Chapter 2 by Lawrence Longley and Neil Peirce (1996)