It seems to me that by far the majority of American citizens skipped the day in US Government class that covered how the Electoral College works (and has worked for over 200 years). Each state has the same number of electors as they have Senators and Congressmen combined which gives smaller states a little bit of a leg up. The founding fathers did this intentionally to keep a couple of large states (such as CA and New York) from running over the rest of the country.
How the electors vote is dictated by State (not Federal) law. Some states do winner takes all, others split the electoral votes by percentage of popular vote.
In reality this past election cycle is only the fourth time on our history that a President has won the Electoral vote but not the popular vote.
1876, Rutherford B Hayes
1888, Benjamin Harrison
2000, George Bush Jr.
2016, Donald Trump
Of course we can't forget the 1824 upset that put John Quincy Adams in the White House, he lost both the popular and electoral vote. The Constitution requires that a candidate receive a minimum of 131 electoral votes and neither candidate did in that election. In that case the Constitution turns the election over to the House of Representatives and he won the vote there.
