The electoral college is designed to have two functions. First, is that it was supposed to be a group of enlightened people that would provide a check on the mob to prevent a demagogue from being elected. This is simply a failure. The US Constitution didn't properly anticipate the inevitable rise of political parties. Outside of slavery, this is its key defect. Electoral college voters are selected for party loyalty and will vote for (by law in a bunch of states) their party leader who won the state. It is simply a rubber stamp and you could entirely do away with the human element and make it about numbers.

Second, the electoral college is designed to be a federalist attempt to balance proportional representation with local self-determination. Small states get outsized power over larger ones by design in order to allow them to protect their interests. We're just at a unique cross-roads where political parties have sorted by population density and one party is now using this advantage to dominate the other. It doesn't help that this party has gone crazy.

I favor an electoral college system, but the arbitrary math behind it has gotten very out of whack. As the country gets unequally larger and larger, the voting power disparities become greater and greater. In an ideal world, we'd come up with a better mathematical solution