The Electoral College may have made sense when it was created, because counting votes and transmitting that information quickly and securely were very difficult tasks in the 18th century. In the 21st century, we have no such excuse.
The Electoral College is clearly a terrible system in terms of its actual representation; by apportioning a state's electoral votes winner-takes-all it creates this bizarre and obviously unfair dynamic where voters who are in the minority party in a given state have essentially no voting power. Republicans in California and Democrats in Texas basically do not matter for the general Presidential election (though they are very important for the primaries). The fact that there are critical "swing states" means that our voting system is fundamentally undemocratic.
Then there's the fact that electors are technically allowed to vote against what their state says, which is even more undemocratic; but in fact this rarely happens so it's not the main problem.
So the Electoral College is awful and we need to get rid of it. That still leaves the question of what to replace it with.
The best system would be to overturn the entire Electoral College system and replace it with a single general election that works directly from the popular vote. Preferably we would also reform our voting system from its current "first-past-the-post" plurality vote which only allows voters to express their top preference and is subject to "spoiling" by third-party candidates and "cloning" where similar candidates can lose by splitting votes even if they are preferred by most people.
The ideal system with which to replace it is called range voting. Each voter gives a score to each candidate on a scale from 0 to 10, and the candidate with the highest score wins. Something that people are always shocked to hear when I tell them is that range voting has been mathematically proven to be the optimal democratic voting system. There's a famous theorem called "Arrow's Impossibility Theorem" which supposedly shows that such an optimal system is impossible---but in fact Arrow made the false assumption that range voting was not feasible. For some reason he thought we could only put candidates in a rank ordering, not actually assign them scores from 0 to 10. (This is baffling to me, as psychologists use range voting in research and corporations use range voting in product quality surveys all the time. If you have rated something on Amazon or Netflix, you have used range voting.) Range voting satisfies all the supposedly "impossible" optimality conditions.
The second choice would be instant-runoff voting, which is the system that Arrow's theorem would lead us to because it almost satisfies the optimality conditions and only requires rank-ordering.
Either range voting or instant-runoff voting would be fantastic, but they would both clearly require a Constitutional amendment to implement.
Failing that, there are also some other systems to consider.
One would be to simply eliminate the Electoral College and make the popular vote win the Presidency. This would be very simple to implement---in fact, a number of states have already pledged to assign their electoral votes to the popular vote winner so long as enough other states agree to do so. With a few more major signatories (Texas is the biggest holdout), this system could be implemented without any Constitutional changes.
A similar system that could be implemented by modifying that pledge would be to allocate electoral votes proportionally within each state. This requires dividing and rounding the proportions. This is actually harder than it sounds, as some states have only a few electors and the rounding method could make a big difference. It also has nothing to recommend it compared to the previous system where the plurality vote winner simply wins all electoral votes.
Another proposal is to separate states into districts and allocate electoral votes by district, which is similar to how we elect Congress. Like Congress, it would be subject to gerrymandering and geographically unequal distributions. And again, it has nothing to recommend it above a simple plurality vote to win.
Another proposal to jury-rig the current system is to simply add some electoral votes that are not tied to a state and automatically allocated to the popular vote. This also has nothing to recommend it; it's more complicated, still requires a Constitutional amendment, and is strictly worse than the system of simply making the plurality vote win.
And the worst reform proposal I've ever seen is to force the Electoral College to vote winner-takes-all in each state. In practice they nearly always do anyway, which is precisely the problem; but in theory they don't strictly have to, and some people worry that electors might shift the election away from what the voters want. But since that rarely happens and isn't the big problem with the Electoral College, this "reform" would be the exact opposite of what we want, simply making all other reforms harder to implement.
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