In fact it's already been tried. Into the 1960s, Georgia used a kind of "state Electoral College" in its primaries. The Supreme Court struck it down in Gray v. Sanders, the case establishing
the "one person, one vote" principle. https://twitter.com/kelliwardaz/status/1192279093909192704

Here's how it worked: GA assigned a set number of "units" (electors) to each county. The biggest counties (like Fulton) got 6; the mid-sized counties got 4; and the smallest got 2. Whichever primary candidate won the most popular votes in a county got all that county's units. 2/

Of course, Fulton was not 3x bigger than the smallest counties. It was about 275x bigger.

As a result, people living in small, rural counties (who were disproportionately white) got far more weight in choosing candidates than those in the big counties like Fulton, which includes Atlanta had much larger African-American populations. 4/

To put it in other terms: in the early 1960s Fulton County had 14 percent of Georgia's population but only 1.5% of its unit votes. Thus voters in Echols County, which had fewer than 2,000 residents, had about 100 times the voting power of those in Fulton. 5/

In the SCOTUS ruling striking down GA's system, Justice William Douglas wrote, "How can one person be given twice or ten times the voting power of another person in a statewide election merely because he lives in a rural area or because he lives in the smallest rural county?” 6/

Justice Douglas then wrote the words we still use today: "The conception of political equality from the Dec- laration of Independence, to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, to the Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth Amendments can mean only one thing: one person, one vote." 7/

Except for one thing: one-person-one-vote didn't apply to the Electoral College, Justice Douglas said, because "specific historical concerns validated the collegiate principle despite its inherent numerical inequality." 8/

In other words, the Electoral College is constitutional ... because it's in the Constitution. 9/

The Court was clear that it didn't approve of the College's inequality, only that it could do nothing about it. But it can do something about state-level inequality, which is what
@kelliwardaz seems to be proposing here. 10/

Re that last point: the Court in Gray v. Sanders acknowledged that the framers had certain ideas about equality when they wrote the Constitution. After the 15th, 17th and 19th Amendments, the Court wrote, "this conception of political equality belongs to a bygone day." 11/

So @kelliwardaz, that's a long way of saying that the answer to your question of whether we could have an Electoral College at the state level is: No.

By the way, if you want to learn even more about the Electoral College, buy my book! It's called "Let the People Pick the President" and it's coming out in March ... just in time for primary season. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250221971