> My recollection from civics was that the college is to prevent populist candidates from winning
The college was a compromise to give a larger voting share to slave owning states that had a high overall population, despite having a relatively smaller number of possible voters.
They worked hand in hand. In other words, given the 3/5s compromise, how to you implement it from a voting perspective? For example, if your state has a population that was 50/50 slave/non-slave, then each non-slave vote was theoretically worth 1 and 3/5s of a vote, but giving individual voters differing weights was deemed unacceptable. The solution was the electoral college in which the votes available to the state could reflect the extra voting power of the non-voting population.
I don't think the electoral college was intended to work the way it does today. If I'm remembering correctly, it was originally a "Frank from town is really smart and well-informed, so I'll send him to DC to choose the president" type of institution. (This is also part of why there was such a long gap between election day and inauguration - the electors still had to get together in DC)
So while the electoral college might have also functioned as a way to redistribute votes within a state... I don't think that was its main purpose.
> If this were the case you'd expect to see a lot more faithless electors in our history than we have seen.
...other than the large numbers in the late 1700s and early 1800s, you mean?
And in any case, "intent" and "actual practice" were pretty different here. But that doesn't mean that the Connecticut Compromise [0] (which split the US legislative body into the House with representation apportioned by population and the Senate with set representation per state) was solely or even primarily due to slavery. And once you had that, using the total of Senators and Representatives for your number of electors makes a good amount of sense.
The 3/5 compromise was to reduce the power of slave owning states as they wanted slaves to count fully for determining the states’ representation in the house so they could maintain more control of the house.
The compromise reduced the control the slave states had.
The college was a compromise to give a larger voting share to slave owning states that had a high overall population, despite having a relatively smaller number of possible voters.