> An election is a legal event and the constitution requires the states to conduct elections in a representative format, which is violated if they then defer to the electoral results of another state.

The history of the Electoral College seems very much at odds with that notion. Indeed, the current state of the Electoral College is at odds with it, since the states mostly switched to winner-take-all apportionment about 100 years ago, and now we regularly get outcomes where the winner of the popular vote is not the winner of the Electoral College.