Originally there weren't all that many places in the Constitutional system where a popular vote actually mattered, though. Senators were elected by state legis

Originally there weren't all that many places in the Constitutional system where a popular vote actually mattered, though. Senators were elected by state legislatures until 1913, for instance, not by popular vote. And the President was elected by the Electoral College, which in its original conception was supposed to have been a kind of grand assembly of the landed aristocracy, much in the same way the Constitutional Convention had been. In line with this conception, Electors were originally (and technically, still are) completely free to vote for whichever candidate they liked, without reference to who won their state's popular vote. And the Electoral College votes by state rather than by a raw count of the votes of the electors, adding a further layer of indirection.