[vundercind]

The actual electors are basically pointless though. You can assign the electoral votes however the states decide to (some split it, et c) and that’s that. The rest is risky pageantry (and not even an entertaining sort!) and has been very nearly since day 1. The human electors have never really functioned like they were supposed to.

[Dalewyn]

I agree that the electors being actual people are mostly an artifact of a bygone era at this point. It's even illegal in most States for an elector to vote contrary to what the State's citizens decided.

That being said though, Congress still has authority to act as a failsafe in the event the College deadlocks and Congressmen are most definitely actual people, so maybe there is some obscure value left in Electors likewise being actual people.

In the interests of Chesterton's Fence and Not Fixing What Ain't Broke(tm), so long as the human nature doesn't become a significant problem it's probably not worth checking out the consequences of changing things around.

[comte7092]

> That being said though, Congress still has authority to act as a failsafe

The irony is that, as originally envisioned, what seems like a failsafe now was how they thought the election would be decided. The EC was just supposed to be a filter, the final election was Congress voting as state blocs. The framers didn’t see the party system coming though.

> Not Fixing What Ain't Broke

If there’s one thing that Americans can generally agree on, it’s that things are definitely broke, just maybe not the particular thing that is broken.

Having too much rigidity in a system is how things end up collapsing out of nowhere. As stated in my prior comments, there’s actually been a significant amount of change and adaption in the constitutional order since 1789, it has just been implicitly down rather than explicitly so in the form of constitutional amendments.