Should the Electoral College be abolished?

The Electoral College gives a minority disproportionate influence

Question: Should the Electoral College be abolished?
Position1 of 2›: Yes, we should abolish the Electoral College
Argument‹3 of 3: The Electoral College gives a minority disproportionate influence

The way the Electoral College is structured means that a relatively small amount of the population has disproportionate influence. This is fundamentally undemocratic.

The argument

The objection is about weight. Under the Electoral College, electors are allocated to states in a way that does not track population exactly, so a vote cast in a sparsely populated state counts for more in the final outcome than a vote cast in a heavily populated one. The citizens of the smaller states are a minority of the electorate, but the system hands them an influence over the presidency that exceeds their numbers, and it does so by design rather than by accident. A second distortion compounds the first. Because states generally award their electors as a bloc to whichever candidate wins there, the contest is effectively decided in the handful of states where the result is genuinely uncertain. Swing-state voters are the ones both campaigns address, visit and make promises to, while voters elsewhere are of little electoral consequence regardless of how many of them there are. The minority whose votes decide the election is narrower still than the small-state advantage alone would suggest. The effect on everyone else is not merely theoretical. Voters in states that are safe strongholds for one party understand that their individual votes will not change how their state's electors are cast, and some conclude that voting is not worth the effort. That is a rational response to the incentives the system creates, and it means the Electoral College does not simply weigh votes unequally but discourages some of them from being cast at all. Taken together these are reasons of principle rather than partisanship. A presidential election is meant to register the preference of the national electorate, and a mechanism that makes some citizens' preferences count for more than others' — and leaves most of the country peripheral to the contest — fails that standard. Proponents of abolition conclude that the Electoral College should be replaced by a system in which every vote carries the same weight.

Premises

[P1]The Electoral College gives sparsely populated states disproportionate influence over the election, magnified further in swing states. [P2] Voters in safe party strongholds feel disincentivised because their votes carry less weight than those in swing states. [C] Therefore, because the Electoral College gives a minority disproportionate influence, we should abolish it.

Counter-arguments

The Electoral College prevents a tyranny of the majority, where the largest and most populated states would decide all elections. It ensures that voters from sparsely populated parts of the country that continue to have important industries also have a significant voice.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] It is not undemocratic, it simply prevents a tyranny of the majority.