A stronger republican faction in the 1848 revolutions in German could have done it: OTL, the Frankfurt Constitution featured a hereditary constitutional monarchy (the "Gutter Crown" offered to and rejected by Frederick William IV of Prussia, effectively killing the proposed government), but wikipedia at least mentions a faction at Frankfurt that favored a government "modeled on the United States". 1848 Germany would lend itself well to the kind of federal structure where an electoral college makes sense, and the idea of "Electors" had been borrowed from the HRE in the first place.
The tricky part is getting the republican faction strong enough to both dominate the Frankfurt Parliament and make a republican constitution stick despite inevitable opposition by the monarchs of Austria, Prussia, etc. And that's a tall order indeed. My best idea of a POD off the top of my head would be to make the food shortages of the mid-to-late 1840s considerably worse that OTL, perhaps by layering another "year without a summer" on top of the OTL potato blight.
Have French President be elected by the Parliament (low and high chambers) functioning as an electoral college until 1962. It was influential enough in the XIXth and XXth century, and without presidential crises of the 1890's, you might see French president holding more power than IOTL (basically, actually being able to use their constitutional powers) and have the model expend further with decolonisation.With a POD of 1790 have more nations adopt an electoral college to elect their president or prime minister. Bonus points if it’s a nation outside of the Americas and a nation the US never owned.
Is there some kind of revenge motivation in play here? Why would we want to do that to nice Europeans?
Surely that's the LAST thing anyone would borrow from the US Constitution?
I agree that is the WORST part of the US Constitution, but in 1787, it made sense to govern a country that extended from Georgia to New Hampshire. If any other country would do it, it would have to be before the telegraph was put into use, and soon enough that it would become entrenched enough (as it is here).Surely that's the LAST thing anyone would borrow from the US Constitution?
Contemporary Germany selects its president through an electoral college of sorts.