Answer:
See below
Explanation:
The electoral college ensures that the most populated states can't always pick the next president. States that have the most population would be able to skew the elections by cancelling out several other less populated state's voters. One large city could cancel out every vote from the state of Rhode Island.
With the electoral college, each state has a given number of votes to cast for a president. Some states can split their college votes while others cast all votes for the same candidate.
If you look at Pennsylvania in 2020 as an example, they have 20 electoral votes. Pennsylvania does not split their votes so all go to just one candidate. In the measurement of votes, it might show that candidate A got 51% of the votes and candidate B got 49%. The 20 electoral votes would all go to candidate A and candidate B gets nothing. Candidate B may have gotten millions of individual votes within the state but that no longer matters. Candidate A won the state so gets all 20 electoral votes. If the country went by the individual vote, Candidate B would keep all those votes he got from the 2 or 3 large cities in Pennsylvania.
It would be easy to see that if you only counted the individual votes (called the popular vote), a candidate could compile more votes from all of the states even though the candidate did not win that state by the majority vote. The electoral college makes sure that a candidate cannot carry those votes from the state that they lost.
If elections were based on this popular vote, then most of the states with small populations would barely affect the outcome of an election. The popularity vote would ensure that the states with the largest populated cities would always control who gets elected.
It would especially be detrimental in todays age since most large cities are almost always voting for just one party.