“Any informed debate about how and why we have an Electoral College must begin with these often forgotten circumstances of its birth. It was not, as many of us learned in school, a brilliant part of the framers’ plan. It did not reflect any coherent political theory but flowed instead from deals the delegates had made in response to the specific conflicts they faced at a particular moment in history. It was settled on only after every other method failed to win enough support. It was, in the words of one constitutional scholar, a “Frankenstein compromise,” adopted mainly so the delegates could finish their work and go home.”