Let's look back to 1787. The United States of America consists of 13 newly independent states that are bound together by the troubled Articles of Confederation. There are big states like Virginia and small states like Delaware. Some of them have slavery; some don't.
At that summer's constitutional convention, white men from those 13 states fussed over how to make a new federal government where everybody (everybody like them, anyway) got an equal slice of the pie.
The debate over how to pick the president actually started with how to create Congress. The congressional puzzle was this: If each state got an equal number of lawmakers in Congress, the small states would wield disproportionate power over the big states. But if states were given seats in Congress according to population alone, the big states' huge delegations could just ignore the smaller states.
The founders split the difference by splitting Congress. The big states got more power in the population-based House of Representatives, and the small states got more power in the Senate, where each state got two votes. (The Southern slave states struck their own deal with the notorious Three-Fifths Compromise: Slaves would count as three-fifths of a person for the sake of political representation.)
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/why-our-presidents-are-elected-by-a-cabal-of-elites/ar-AAlIBec?li=BBnb7Kz
