2016 Postmortem

the process has been in place since 1789, ostensibly to keep one section of the country from being dominant (back then it was New England vs New York/Pennsylvania vs the South), but populations have shifted drastically since then. We've seen two failures since 2000, both cases where the winner of the popular vote lost the electoral college vote do to the heavy weighting of sparsely populated rural states.

Unforunately, abolishing it requires the votes of those thinly settled states, who like the power it gives them too much to do so.