Simon Lazarus for TNR:

If the current constitutional structure frequently yielded electoral count victors who lost the national majority vote, then indeed, the Constitution should be amended, and liberals should support such an amendment. But that’s not what’s happened. In the 235 years since the Constitution was first ratified, popular-majority winners have lost the electoral count a mere five times—in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016.

In the same vein, if the current constitutional procedure systematically disadvantages liberals or Democrats, they should absolutely favor junking it. But that widely believed fact is also incorrect. While it’s true that the electoral count provisions of the Constitution give individual voters in thinly populated states more sway over their states’ electoral vote winners than individual voters in densely populated states, the real-world partisan impact of that abstract defect is negligible or nonexistent. Historically, the left-right tilt of virtually all states, big and small, has shifted often and will surely shift again. Even the “solid South” included exceptions not too long ago, e.g., in Florida, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee. And now Georgia and North Carolina are competitive. At present, as Timothy Noah points out, of the 10 smallest states, those with three or four electoral votes, only half tilt red.

In actuality, the Electoral College is a phantom target. What its critics actually have in mind is the “winner-take-all” arrangement that governs the choice of electors in all but two small states—Maine and Nebraska. But that arrangement, despite its near-universality, is not mandated by the Constitution at all. The Constitution merely requires that, every 10 years, the federal government must conduct a national census, on the basis of which each state is allotted a percentage of the total number of electors proportionate to its share of the national population. But how states choose to select their electors is entirely up to each state. For at least a century, states’ electors have been slates picked by majorities of eligible voters. Hence, the Electoral College set up by the Constitution has long functioned as a mere pass-through for state-wide popular majorities. (Eligibility, of course, has not always encompassed all appropriate residents or even citizens.)