Phil how does that work? Does the Upper house have equal votes for each State? How is it all equal?
As Manoli linked, you can read about our Electoral system, but to answer the question directly each state (we have 6 - they're just physically very large compared to your states) has 12 Senators, and the two territories have 2 Senators each. So each state has the same representation in the Senate and they serve fixed, 6 year terms with half of them being elected every 3 years (the normal period of the lower house). There is an exception to that in that the constitution provides for what is known as a double dissolution, but that's not particularly relevant to this discussion.
Senators for each state are elected under a preferential voting system (as is the lower house).
In response to your point of why the states would change? That's not the point - the point is discussing a better and fairer way and acknowledging that the current EC isn't helping your country.
Oh, and why would CA give that up? Because based on the popular vote, the Dem candidate might have got up - it depends on exactly how you do it. Fortunately, someone has already crunched the numbers for us to see:
http://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/13319/who-would-have-won-the-presidency-if-all-states-electors-were-allocated-proportI'll repost the results here:
Quote:
I calculated the vote allocation using the Webster/Sainte-Laguë method (based on results as of November 9, 2016) applied to each individual state:
•Clinton 263
•Trump 262
•Johnson 10
•Stein 2
•McMullin 1
In the spirit of the Electoral College giving less populous states a boost in the vote, I altered the formula to award 2 votes per state to the winner of the popular vote, and the remainder allocated via Webster/Sainte-Laguë:
•Trump 269
•Clinton 259
•Johnson 7
•Stein 2
•McMullin 1
For comparison, here I applied Webster/Sainte-Laguë to the entire United States population without splitting them based on state:
•Clinton 256
•Trump 255
•Johnson 17
•Stein 1
•McMullin 1
•Other 8 (these were not separated in the data source)
***
It makes for an interesting exercise. Trump may still have won in such a scenario, but of course in such a scenario, campaigning would be different so this is really just illustrative of the outcome compared to the "winner takes all" approach as it stands (which was 306 to 232). It suggests that such a change would provide a more representative result based on the overall vote, providing a result closer to "one person one vote", which is an established principle of fairness in democracy. Again, though, campaigning would have been different under such models.
The real benefit is that all states are in play for both sides (or perhaps even an independent here or there).