Yes, my bad; I can see how that was unclear. I meant later by the Framers. They introduced the idea to placate the Southern states and justified it however they could to see that it went through. I don’t think the other arguments for the electoral college went back as far, which is why I said that. Remember, the Three-Fifths Compromise had already been made before the issue of the electoral college was brought up. The Three-Fifths Compromise was then essentially cloned and implemented in the form of the electoral college, which demographically mirrored the structure of the House of Representatives. Whatever other arguments were made about the electoral college were made to justify it after the Three-Fifths Compromise had already been hammered out.

The strongest point in all of this, to me, is that the Southern bloc could have and almost certainly would have blocked any electoral system for the executive branch that did not give them the same concessions they got for the legislative branch. None of the ideological arguments, whether genuine or not, carried anywhere near that weight. Nobody was going to kill the whole deal without an electoral college, except for the Southern slaveholding states.