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.
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The mechanism works like this: Article 2, Section 1, gives each state legislature broad authority to direct how its electors are appointed. States have used this authority before — Maine and Nebraska allocate by congressional district. The NPVIC uses it aggressively: Every member state pledges to deliver all of its electors to the national popular vote winner once the 270-vote threshold is met by July 20 of a presidential election year. At 222 votes, the compact is roughly four states from activation. Analysts have identified Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, and one of Wisconsin, Nevada, or New Hampshire as the most likely path — achievable in the 2027 state legislative cycle if Democrats gain unified control in any three.
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Three constitutional problems
The constitutional argument against the NPVIC rests on three grounds. The first is the compact clause of Article 1, Section 10. States may not enter agreements that affect the political balance of power without congressional consent. Scholars writing in the Harvard Journal on Legislation argue that an agreement among states to collectively override the founders’ method of presidential selection is precisely what the compact clause prohibits. The NPVIC’s architects disagree. The Supreme Court hasn’t ruled.
The second problem is structural. The founders explicitly rejected direct popular election of the president at the Constitutional Convention after deliberate debate. Small-state delegations would not ratify a constitution where large-state population majorities decided every presidential election. The Electoral College was the compromise. The NPVIC routes around it, which is constitutionally the same thing with a lower procedural bar.
The third problem is financial-practitioner basic: Once a pooling agreement activates, it overrides the preferences of parties who joined before scale. Virginia’s legislature signed up in 2026. It pre-commits Virginia’s votes to whatever national conditions are in 2028, 2032, and beyond, producing conditions no current legislator can foresee. That’s not a technicality. That’s the design.
The partisan map and the missing alternative
Every jurisdiction that has joined the NPVIC voted Democrat in 2016 and 2020 — all 18 states plus the District of Columbia. Not one had a Republican trifecta at adoption. In 2000 and 2016, Democrats won the popular vote and lost the Electoral College. The NPVIC converts those margins into victories. Calling it a democratic reform while acknowledging exclusive partisan adoption requires a tolerance for cognitive dissonance the public debate rarely supplies.
It’s worth noting that the 2024 election changed the political calculus: President Donald Trump won both the popular vote and the Electoral College, the first Republican to do so in two decades. The compact’s logic doesn’t disappear — a future election can reproduce 2016 — but the confident prediction that the NPVIC permanently benefits one party is now harder to make.
The constitutional alternative is Article 5: two-thirds of both chambers of Congress and ratification by 38 states. That threshold is hard by design. Electoral College reform that can’t get 38 states to ratify hasn’t achieved the consensus the founders required before restructuring federal elections. Once the compact activates, the compact clause litigation reaches the Supreme Court within weeks of the first election conducted under it — litigating presidential election rules midcycle produces institutional damage no ruling fully reverses.
Spanberger called this a way to ensure “every vote counts equally.” Virginia‘s votes don’t count equally under the NPVIC. They count as part of a national total that overrides what Virginia’s voters chose. If 40 states prefer Candidate A and Virginia prefers Candidate B, Virginia’s electoral votes go to Candidate A. That’s Virginia’s voters being overruled by voters they’ve never met, under an agreement their governor signed without a constitutional amendment, without congressional approval, and without the broad consensus the founders built into Article 5 for exactly this reason.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.
