I feel the original question was more in the line of "Why are US presidential election are not like elections in the many other democratic countries?" and is a huge trivialization of a complicated issue.
Re:Live Presidential Forecast
by humanrebar on Tuesday November 08, 2016 @11:36PM
(#12906072)
Because you won't convince 3/4 of states to change it. And it's not worth a new constitutional convention over that issue.
We actually only need to convince another 105 electoral votes worth of states: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
However, my interpretation of the original question was that of "why are they still in existence?".