The link is to the History Channel. How does the New Times figure into it?
The major source appears to have been "Jesse Wegman, a member of the New York Times editorial board and author of Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College". The EC was built in at the start as a filter to mitigate the bullying by a few large states of all the rest of the states. The author doesn't explain how maintaining the EC suppressed black votes (it doesn't), and avoids calling "malapportionment" Gerrymandering, which was invented or at the very least named for its best known practitioner, Elbridge Gerry, Masschusetts Democrat (naturally the wikiliars stress "Democratic-Republican", the Democrat party that Jefferson called "Republican" and which triumphed over the Federalist party) of the early 19th c.