The Constitution of the United States Article II, Section 1, second paragraph, says:
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress
Thus the legislature
- could choose the electors itself, or it
- could require the governor to appoint them, or it
- could do what 48 of the 50 states do and have the voters choose them in such a manner that all of the state's electors are committed to vote for the same candidate, or it
- could do what Maine and Nebraska do, having two electors chosen state-wide and one in each congressional district, or it
- could do what North Carolina did when John Adams ran unsuccessfully for re-election in 1800, dividing the states into a number of electoral districts equal to the number of electors and having the voters choose one elector in each district (thus there were two more such districts than the number of congressional districts), or it
- could do what Maryland and some other states have recently done, saying the state's electors would be chosen according to the nation-wide popular vote, provided a certain number of other states adopt the same legislation, or it
- could do something else.
My question is: Has the history of what the states have done about this been written?
(BTW, the term "electoral college" is unofficial, imported from Germany's First Reich, in which membership in the electoral college was hereditary.)