The Electoral College is an anachronism which dearly needs to be eliminated. The Electoral College was created to give more power to the smaller less populous states in our nation’s early years. It was a concession given because a state such as Delaware feared that a larger state such as Pennsylvania might take advantage of its size and essential rule over the smaller state. But it was still a compromise to bring peace and agreement to the then Federalist form of government. You must remember that we started at 13 individual republics who via the Constitution were united in to a singular republic with a strong central government but still allowing states certain powers of anonymity.
But as we have grown to 50 states and nearly 300 million people, the original algorithm to provide equality is now having the opposite effect. The reason is simple: state political parties pick their electors but the prevailing party always ends up with all the electors. For example, Massachusetts has 9 U.S. Representatives and 2 U.S. Senators giving it 11 electors. As Massachusetts is a strongly blue state, the entire representation will be Democrat and the electors will vote accordingly. But Massachusetts has a rather conservation portion of the state, Western Massachusetts. It is not difficult to have that political district vote Republican but their votes will count for nothing.
Texas is a good example of the opposite situation. Texas could easily vote 55% to 45% favoring the Republican candidate. Texas has a population of about 28 million people. That means the 12 million people who voted Democratic will have not voice in the presidential outcome. The same is true of California which typically votes Democrat but which has very large portions of the state which vote Republican.
The point is, if you are going to keep the Electoral College then it must be modified to accommodate that portion of a state’s population which does not vote with the majority political party. By attaching electors who represent the majority view of their political district, the Electoral College will become much more effective and fair.
The other thing to do is to eliminate the electoral college completely and have Presidents elected directly by the people which ultimately is the most fair solution. The impact of this with regard to previous elections is that at least 5 people who held the office of President but lost the popular vote would not have made it into office. To allow the minority vote to have purchase over the majority is an injustice and certainly something which keeps so many people away from the polls as they believe that their vote really does not count, and sadly, that may be the exact case.