Picture if you will a future national election in which a presidential candidate receives a majority of the popular vote, but is denied the 270 votes necessary for election by the electoral college....Imagine the public outcry today, after a long primary campaign and a grueling race for the Presidency. Imagine the public's rage at being denied their candidate of choice.
Becky Cain (President, League of Women Voters)

If We the People would want to amend the Constitution after the Loser President materializes - and I tend to think we would - why are we now just waiting for the inevitable accident to happen?
Akhil Amar (Professor, Yale Law School)

The reformers (perhaps including the sponsors of these amendments) speak of this popular-vote-electoral-vote discrepancy as a "time bomb waiting to go off," but the one time it did go off, in 1888, nothing happened; there was hardly a ripple of popular discontent, no complaints from the losing candidate, Grover Cleveland, that he had been cheated, no spate of editorials claiming that Benjamin Harrison was an illegitimate president. Unfortunately, I fear the public would react differently today, largely because the moral authority of the Electoral College - indeed, of the Constitution itself - has been undermined by these persistent efforts by members of Congress to replace it with a system of direct popular elections.
Walter Berns (Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute)

I remember at about 6:00 AM after election night thinking to myself that this was the end of the Electoral College. That's when I wrote An Open Letter To All Americans Concerned About The Electoral College and sent it to everybody I could. However, in the six months or so since the inauguration, there seems to be no real effort to actually get rid of it. That probably has something to do with the fact that it would take a Constitutional amendment to make even the slightest change, let alone scrap the system. And amendments are extremely hard to get passed. That is why any reform of the Electoral College will most likely occur at the state level. The Constitution gives state legislatures some control over the actual mechanics of the system, most importantly, the manner of choosing electors.

Right now, 48 states and the District of Columbia choose their electors using an at-large popular vote. That means that whichever candidate wins the most votes gets all of that state's electoral votes. This is also known as the winner-take-all system. Two states, Maine and Nebraska, choose their electors using a district popular vote. In this system, the winner of each congressional district wins an electoral vote, and the at-large winner of the state gets an additional two electoral votes. The Constitution leaves the method to be used in the hands of the state legislatures. In the past, only three basic systems have been used: the at-large popular vote, the district popular vote, and having the legislature itself make the choice. However, in theory, if a state wanted to, they could make the candidates draw straws or even arm wrestle for the votes! But in practice, the people of each state wouldn't keep a legislator in office who took their presidential vote away.

The National Conference of State Legislatures reports that in 2001, every state has introduced bills aimed at the election reform - over 1,600 in total. Besides changes to the Electoral College, other proposals include recount protocols, absentee balloting, voting machine standards, ballot design, and exit polling restrictions. The NCSL has created a regularly updated repository of this information called the Database of Election Reform Legislation. You can search the database by state, by category, or using your own search criteria. Below is a synopsis of some of the proposals that deal with the Electoral College.

By far, the most widely proposed reform.

The proportional system most widely touted would allocate electors based on the popular vote percentage received. For example, if you received 40% of the at-large popular vote, you would receive 40% of the electors in that state. The proportional system in Washington would have given electoral votes to the top three candidates. The Vermont plan is a complicated proportional scheme that will make your head hurt just thinking about it! (Check out the NCSL site if you're interested and have your aspirin handy.)

It's a little surprising that they would consider this, seeing how so many states are mulling a switch towards Nebraska's system.

Several states already bind their electors to vote as they are expected (see Which Electors Are Bound?). The Michigan and North Carolina proposals would increase the penalties they already have on faithless electors.

These bills basically are shows of support of the Electoral College and ask Congress not to mess with it.

This bill encourages Congress to scrap the Electoral College for a direct nationwide election.