It wasn't supposed to be this way....

 So many people don't comprehend the brilliance of the United States Constitution in its original form, the current version as amended and the way in which the majority of states assign their presidential electors has clouded the waters of the original ideas.  Plus so many teachers don't teach the actual reasons for the provisions that were made as they themselves don't truly understand the purpose of so many of the things that were included.  In popular society today, it has lead to the promotion of two, let's call the myths.  

The framers of the constitution had to deal with two very large issues in order to legitimize the sovereignty of the United States as a whole, by cementing the sovereign rights of the people with the rights of 13 equally sovereign states.  Educators today frequently discount the second part of that problem.  There were two extremely important innovations to ensure that those rights were respected, and unfortunately a change to the constitution by people who didn't understand the concept caused a shift in that balance and with unforeseen and likely unintended negative impact. 

Myth #1:  The electorial college is antiquated, flawed because it causes presidents to be elected that don't reflect the will of the people, and needs to be repealed.

Completely FALSE.  The electorial college was created because the founding fathers didn't trust the popular vote to reflect the will of the people AND the individual member states of the Federal Union.   Having a strictly popular vote based method of electing the president would have created a situation they considered the tyranny of the masses, where the rural and less populated states and areas of the country would not be represented in the election of the president.  The original idea is that the electors would be allocated the way that Maine and Nebraska do it today.  Whoever wins the popular vote in a congressional district receives the elector for that district and whoever wins the popular vote in a state received the electors representing the two senators of that state, or if there were a case of someone not winning more than 50% of the popular vote, the electors would be split among the two candidates who received the most votes.  This ensured that the person who was elected represented both the will of the people and the will of the states.  Although I'm pretty sure that the original intention was that the senatorial electors would be appointed by the legislatures of the states in order to represent the states in selecting the president. (Seeing a pattern here yet, States, People, Balance?)

Myth #2:  Congress is elected and was intended to represent the people and give them a voice in their governance.

Partially TRUE.  As it stands today, after the passing and ratifying of the 17th amendment, the US Congress doess indeed represent the people, but it doesn't do a very good job of representing the individual soverign states, who collectively are supposed to have the same rights as the people under our system.  

Before the 17th Amendment was passed and ratified, Congress was supposed to represent the rights of the people and the states equally.  The House of Representatives was intended to represent the people, and thus was given the power of the purse, to ensure that the people had control of the government's financial matters, and the right to impeach.  To ensure that the people were properly represented, the seats in the House were apportioned among the states based on population.  The Senate however was originally intended to represent the rights of the individual states and thus was given two representatives per state since every state is supposed to be equal in the Union.  The Vice President is the representative of the people in the Senate, casting the tie-breaking vote should the representatives of the states not be able to come to an agreement.  This is why presidential appointments have to be ratified by the Senate and why the Senate is the place where a trial of an elected official who is impeached takes place, it ensures that the president doesn't appoint officials who the States don't approve of by essentially giving them oversight on the Executive and Judicial branches of the government.  The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court takes over and presides over the Senate during an impeachment of the President because the will of the people has already been expressed by the impeachment itself, and the Vice President has a conflict of interest in such a trial whereas the Chief Justice is essentially impartial since his job isn't going anywhere based on the outcome of the trial. Disputes between the states and the federal government or even among the states were thus supposed to be handled within the Senate either through arbitration or derailing laws that were harmful to the states to begin with.   This is why the state legislatures were tasked with appointing the representative for the states to the Senate.   The 17th amendment changed all that.  It unfortunately shifted the balance of power in the legislative branch in favor of the people and discounted the rights of the states by making the senators elected by popular vote within the states.   Thus they were answerable to the people and not the states.    Unfortunately this shift of power caused a situation where the states must now clog up the judicial system by having their attorney generals file suit in Federal court whenever there is an abuse of the states by the Federal government, something that I'm sure was not foreseen by the authors and promoters of the 17th amendment.   It also caused precedents which gave the judicial branch even more power as far as oversight of the other two branches and the rights of the individual states are concerned.  

Anyway, this is just an FYC piece, explaining why there is a large imbalance of power in the US Government today, and why so many things seem to be backwards in the way things are done.