Exactly, and it is supposed to be. We are a republic and not a democracy. The founders strongly opposed democracy. One of the reasons being that minorities would have no representation if your government is by majority rule only.
For instance, the electoral college now is almost nothing more than a rubber stamp, with the electors themselves now supposedly having to follow the will of the individual voters who have chosen a candidate for their state. This has not always been the way.
Which is to say, the way that we now elect the president is supposed to be democratic. The fact that many states have laws against faithless electors, which goes against the very design of the electoral college in the first place, which was to have "intelligent/elite" individuals to make a decision on who would truly be the best candidate for the whole of the country.
So when discussing the (again, specifically the election of the President, also see 12th amendment) electoral college, we cannot say that this is a republican process; it is not.
People act like the electoral college system is some unchangeable entity that is fundamental to this country, yet we have changed it countless times over the past 220ish years, (including 14th, 15th, 19th, 22nd, 23rd, 24th, and 26th amendments to the US Constitution, which all effectively deal with who can vote, or how we choose a president/VP. Further, each state has changed many times how they choose the electors, which once may have been chosen by the legislator, but is now by popular vote).
Almost each and every change was designed to make the election of the President a more democratic process. To simply say that we are a republic and not a democracy misses the point, is untrue, ignores history, and is frankly, a lame excuse as to why we don't have a more democratic system for electing our president.
It does not miss the point, this was the intention despite what may have changed later. Certainly it might be better stated that we were intended to be a republic, but that has been weakened over time. The founders also stated that government would always move towards greater concentrations of power and that the constitution was only a parchment barrier. Assuming that later revisions are improvements would be a logical fallacy without understanding original intent.
If we judge the college based upon the criteria that motivated its creation, then we inevitably reach the conclusion that the college should be abolished.
However, if you want a true republic and protection against the problems of majority rule, then you might want to potentially change it, but not abolish it.
https://fee.org/articles/the-accidental-genius-of-the-electo...
As it stands, we have minority rule in nearly every branch of federal government.
Larry Lessig is probably the most prominent person calling for this. He has an op-ed in the Washington Post about this right now.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-constitution-let...
Also, Dave Winer mirrored it here: http://scripting.com/2016/11/25/lessigOnTheElectoralCollege....
This is such an awful argument. North Korea is a republic and not a democracy. China is a republic and not a democracy. Denmark is a monarchy and a democracy. Why would you want your country to be an undemocratic republic when you could be a democratic republic?
The USA is both a republic and a democracy. You could say, a democratic republic.
Since there is, more or less, no other type of democracy around when a colloquial English speaker says "democracy" they mean representative democracy. Everything else is a pointless annoying semantic game.
Representative democracy is a perfectly acceptable term. Trying to shoehorn monarchies into the term "republic" is absurd.
