The EC has devolved into a nod, a mere courtesy to federalism. Most state laws require the candidate with the most popular votes to receive the electoral votes.
True. In fact, the EC never did work as intended.
Much the same applied, however, when senators were in theory elected by the legislature.
Lincoln and Douglass, for instance, campaigned in their famous debates all over IL. This turned the elections for state legislatures to a considerable extent into a popular election of the Senator, since people voted for the party that would elect the Senator they wanted to go to Washington.
The notion that the people elected state legislators individually, and then they as a group elected the state’s senators seldom if ever applied in US history. It was always more complicated than that.
While you are correct in practice, the laws actually require that a slate of electors pledged to vote for the candidate who gains the most popular votes in that state be the ones casting the state’s electoral votes. There is still no provision in the law that would prevent an elector from pledging to vote for the winning candidate and then when the time came, to vote for a different candidate. If you recall, in 2000, there was some talk about the possibility of swaying a faithless elector or two to vote against Bush. Obviously, that didn’t happen, but if it had, there is no legal way to prevent it.