As Michael Signer explains, the framers were particularly afraid of the people choosing a demagogue. The electors, Hamilton believed, would prevent someone with “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity” from becoming president. And they would combat “the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.” They would prevent America’s adversaries from meddling in its elections. The founders created the Electoral College, in other words, in part to prevent the election of someone like Donald Trump.

To modern American ears, it sounds insanely undemocratic for electors to ignore the will of the people of their state. But were Hamilton alive, he might wonder why Americans find this undemocratic feature of the Electoral College so outrageous while taking its other undemocratic features virtually for granted. For instance, each state gets as many electors as it has members of the House of Representatives and Senate. (The District of Columbia now gets a few, too). That is itself undemocratic. It’s undemocratic because while representatives are allocated between the states via population, senators are not. Each state gets two: Whether it has 38 million people (California) or half a million (Wyoming). Because states, not people, are represented equally in the Senate, the Senate is undemocratic. And because a state’s number of electors is based partly on its number of senators, the Electoral College is thus partially undemocratic too.

Moreover, every state except Nebraska and Maine allocates its electors based on the principle of winner take all. Win California by one vote and you get all its electors. For that reason, too, the Electoral College does not always reflect the popular vote. In two of the last five presidential elections, in fact, the candidate who received the most votes—Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016—has lost the Electoral College. Americans are mildly but not profoundly disturbed by this. Most of the people protesting Donald Trump’s election are not protesting because he lost the popular vote. When George W. Bush became president after losing the popular vote in 2000, there were protests, but no real question about the inevitability of his taking office. In this way, as in many others, Americans comfortably accept undemocratic elements of America’s system of government even as they profess publicly that democracy is sacrosanct.

In truth, Americans are wedded less to democracy than to familiarity. They accept those undemocratic features of the Electoral College, and of American government in general, to which they’re accustomed. They value things as they are.

This makes sense. Americans are used to choosing presidents in a particular way. As the University of Michigan constitutional law professor Richard Primus pointed out to me, they’re like a family that for as long as anyone can remember has been playing a board game by a certain set of rules. What happens if, in the middle of a game, one player consults the instructions, finds that the actual rules are different, and proposes suddenly abiding by them instead? The other players—especially those who would be disadvantaged by the change—will likely refuse.