Electoral college history stolen from someone on Slashdot that I forgot to get their name to credit them. Felt it was a unique historical perspective and wanted to share it:
[T]he Electoral College operated differently at the beginning, and if you read the various proposals and debates among the Founders, it's very clear that their motivations were quite different.
I'll try to sum it up briefly. There were some of the Founders who wanted Congress to choose the President. There were others who wanted more diverse voices from state government representatives. Few really wanted to entrust it to "the people," because they had all read their ancient Greek and Roman history and knew that democracies were largely disasters that eventually ended up putting tyrants into power.
There is NOTHING in the Constitution saying how Electoral College members are chosen, only that the state legislatures decide how. In the majority of states for the first few decades of the U.S., Electors were mostly chosen by state governments -- many states didn't even bother holding a popular vote AT ALL. Others had various hybrid systems. See the Wikipedia article on the Electoral College if you want more details.
Anyhow, how precisely did the Founders think things were going to work? Remember that there were no political parties at the beginning. They all assumed George Washington would be the first president, but they couldn't imagine consensus emerging after him. So the Electoral College was set up to create a "short list" of good candidates chosen by the states (according to whatever method the legislatures decided).
The Electors originally did not cast separate votes for President and Vice President -- they just had two votes, and at least one of them was required to be not for his home state. That was to prevent states from just deadlocking by electing people from home (since so much was invested in individual states at this time).
The idea was that most Electors would end up voting for someone from their home state, but also someone with more regional or even national consensus. And then those few names would float to the top -- and the "short list" would be sent to Congress to actually decide the election. Remember that originally the person with the most votes would be President, and the person with the 2nd-most votes would be VP.
The Founders -- living before political parties -- assumed that Congress (specifically the House of Representatives) would choose the President in most elections. The Electoral College only existed to create a "short list" based on representatives of state governments and thereby to guarantee more diversity than might come from an established body like Congress. (Also, Electors were required to meet SEPARATELY in their states, not en masse, to prevent the sort of collusion and "backroom dealing" that might happen in a body like Congress. That was another benefit.)
THOSE were the reasons why the Electoral College was created. It originally had nothing to do with most of the crap people say today. The concept that a "popular vote" would even be taken for President in most states wasn't even contemplated by the Founders, who just preferred to get input from state governments to narrow down the field, rather than letting Congress choose the President directly.
So now you know. The Founders were much more anti-"democratic" than you ever thought. And they introduced this complex mechanism to prevent centralized collusion and to get regional consensus around a short list of candidates in an era before parties and factions were assumed.