Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) signed legislation in April 2026 committing the state’s 13 electoral votes to whoever wins the national popular vote — regardless of how Virginians actually voted. That’s not a hypothetical. It’s the law. And it moves the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact to 222 electoral votes — 82% of the 270 needed to automatically trigger and override the Electoral College without amending a single word of the Constitution.

Thirty years advising institutional investors has taught me one thing about contracts: Read what happens when they activate, not what they say at signing. The NPVIC looks modest on paper and radical in practice. It doesn’t amend the Constitution. It converts the Electoral College — the federated mechanism the founders built to prevent elections from being decided by the most populous states — into a national head count through an interstate deal that has never been tested in a federal court and probably won’t be until it’s too late.