It seems to me there are two issues here. The wants of each state’s collective populace and the wants of the people within them.
The system of state’s winner-takes-all in the electoral college came to be before the Civil War (though after the American Revolution and founding) because the two dominant political parties (at the time the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists) wished to consolidate the votes of the states they each tended to get more votes in respectively. It was a kind of arms race. Jeffersonian Anti-Federalists and Adams Federalists both quickly realized that once all the EC votes in a given state that favored the other party went to it, the only chance to win a POTUS election was to pass state legislation making it the same in the states that favored their own party. This is a scenario that will be familiar to anyone who’s played strategy games.
This may even have made a good bit of sense at a time when voters identified more with their states than with their country as a whole. These days however, I would argue that people identify less with their states than with whether they live in an urban or rural area. And also, unfortunately, with the tribalism of race, though I’m highly skeptical that is anything it’s wise to encourage.
If you took a popular vote and didn’t allow reporting until all polls were closed, then every voter would have an equal say. It’s true that Wyoming as a whole would have way less influence than California or Texas as a whole, but each voter in Wyoming would have exactly as much say as each voter in California or Texas. So a key question it seems, in determining the fairness of the state’s winner-takes-all EC system, is whether people think of themselves first as Wyomingites, Californians and Texans, or first as Americans.
I would argue that if most Americans place an allegiance ahead of their country, it is not to their states of residency but to their race, economic class, sex or perhaps even whether they live in an urban or rural area.
Mind you I do think there are arguments for the states that use the winner-takes-all system in directing their electors how to vote to continue to do so. But I’m pretty skeptical as to whether someone would be disenfranchised simply because they only got the same individual vote-strength in Wyoming as they got in California. Simply put, the state having a say is not the same as the voters in a state having a say. Moreover, even in the current system, states with as few EC votes as Wyoming and Montana get ignored anyway, because the race would have to be even closer than any EC vote has ever been for them to make a difference in the outcome. As such, the franchise of Wyomingites isn’t actually protected by their individual votes having more weight than individual Californians, because the state still has far too few EC votes to influence the outcome of the election. For the winner-takes-all system to protect them, Wyoming would need many more EC votes, if not quite as many as California, to the point where the state votes could matter to the outcome. But going by the popular vote, or returning to the proportional allocation the first 13 states originally used in the EC, would protect the individual franchise of Wyomingites, though not the state as a collective entity.
That said, at least a plurality of the states would have to voluntarily move to a popular or back to proportional system in the same cycle, or all of them would have to under a much less likely Constitutional Amendment, for otherwise a few states doing it would be guaranteeing that their EC votes, and thus their individual voters’ POTUS ballots, are at least as ignored as those of states such as Wyoming and Montana already are. This hearkens back to why the winner-takes-all system emerged in the first place, because it was a way to consolidate votes within a state that made it more influential to the outcome than a state that didn’t do it.
In the interest of being clear. I do think there is sound logic in the States’ Rights doctrine, and @RatMan was quite right to push back against my facile dismissal of it. Indeed, this the good reason why the Senate is constituted as it is. I’m just not especially convinced that balance-of-power is represented in the winner-takes-all allocation to the Electoral College vote for POTUS.
