Liz Warren is a complete moron who is lying.
I think there are a fair amount of people on the far Left that dream of a system in which the majority (in their view, them) has completely autocratic power over the minority. I don't doubt for a second that someone like Warren wouldn't hesitate to strip away rights from her ideological opposites if she was given the opportunity. In a direct democratic system, I can only imagine the unprecedented levels of propaganda and manipulation we would see, beyond even what we see every two years now.
Well, the fact that the Electoral College is the worst possible electoral system in the Universe has nothing to do with autocratic power, but everything to do with the fact that EC is a system that, by design, allows a huge discontinuity outcome, leading to a fair chance that a random error will decide the outcome of the election.
Popular vote (with possibly over-weighing the votes from the small states) is the only fair system in the 21st Century.
The Electoral College is the absolute best way to determine a leader in a Presidential system where the President is both Head-of-State and Head-of-Government.
It is the fairest and most equitable manner for a large, divergent, and divided (geographically, ideologically, etc...) nation to elect for that office.
There is no valid reason for what EC accomplishes that the proportional system cannot. Definitely not the "smaller states have more say." A few days after the 2016 Elections I showed here that Clinton would have won the elections even if we re-counted everything in terms of "California votes" - that is, if we gave every state the vote weight that is proportional to the vote-shares coming from EC (that is, if we effectively over-weigh every "small" state). In fact, the margin of the difference would have changed rather insignificantly. (Alternatively, one can see this as Electoral vote count if each party keeps the proportion of votes in each state.)
As I said, the main reason why EC is mathematically a stupid model is the singularity it introduces. That is, especially for the big "battleground" states, an arbitrarily small difference in the state vote . 2016 elections weren't won by Trump because of the "small guys". The chief reason for the victory was that 77,700 votes (0.057 PERCENT of the total votes cast) swung the electoral count by (16+20+10)/538 = 8.55 PERCENT. This is nothing against Trump - he won fair and square. But any system that creates a singularity like that is inherently awful.