Article II of the U.S. Constitution lays out a clear process for the election of presidents, under which each state will choose electors equal to the combined total of their representation in Congress. Those electors choose the president. The idea behind the Electoral College was to make sure state interests were fairly represented by the new central government.
In recent decades, the Electoral College has been the object of scorn among liberals. The principled argument they make is that it is a countermajoritarian institution, giving more weight to voters in a small number of swing states. The real-world argument is that Democrats Al Gore and Hillary Clinton received the most total votes nationwide in 2000 and 2016, yet Republicans George W. Bush and Donald Trump were elected. While Joe Biden has had a solid wire-to-wire lead in national polling, liberals are still anxiously awaiting whether Trump will be able to eke out a victory in a critical mass of states.
In reality, it isn’t even clear what would happen if elections were fought based on a national popular vote. Democrats assume they would have an advantage, but there is no clear reason to think so. Outcomes would surely change were Republicans to focus campaign efforts in conservative parts of California, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, and other states that are currently written off by the Electoral College system.
Yet liberals are convinced that ending the Electoral College would lock them into power for a generation, and so, a growing number of them have been pushing for its abolition since the 2000 election. But they don’t want to have to go through the long and arduous but required process of amending the Constitution because they would surely fail. And so, they have come up with an idea they believe will help them hack the Constitution, creating an end around to end the role of the Electoral College.
Under their proposed National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, states would agree to pledge electors to cast votes on the basis of the national popular vote, rather than based on their own state’s popular vote. States signing on to this scheme would allow it to go into effect once enough states have joined to represent a 270-vote Electoral College majority. Without formally ending the Electoral College, this would effectively move toward a system in which the president is elected by the national popular vote.
Currently, states representing 196 votes have joined the compact. That seems impressive, but it is mainly the low-hanging fruit — populous liberal states such as New York and California.
For now, this number also includes Colorado, where the Legislature passed a law joining the compact. But next Tuesday, voters will have the opportunity to repeal this silly scheme. They should jump at the chance and throw it out.
The scheme is constitutionally questionable. Article I of the U.S. Constitution says, “No State shall, without the Consent of Congress … enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State.” But assume for the moment that they can get congressional approval and that, as if by magic, we can just skirt around the whole problem of there being no national elections authority with any experience handling the voting process.
This is where the real problems begin. First, although this compact is pitched as being more democratic, it is, in fact, exactly the opposite. Imagine Californians, having voted Democratic by 20 to 30 points in an election, forced to give their electoral votes to Trump or some other Republican, just because voters in other states put that candidate over the top. Talk about your vote not counting — that is anti-democracy at work.
Second, the entire argument against the Electoral College is based on shallow, flawed thinking. Yes, the system confers some benefits on small states such as Vermont, Wyoming, Rhode Island, and Delaware. But it returns those benefits directly to large-population states if they have large numbers of nonvoters. Take California, which has a large noncitizen immigrant population that (unless those rumors of fraud are real) cannot be reflected in vote totals but is reflected in electoral votes.
Even setting noncitizens aside, states with low voter participation among those eligible (California is also one of these) also benefit from the current system. Californians, New Mexicans, and New Yorkers were among the nation’s lowest participation voters in 2016 (Hawaiians were the worst, at 43% of their voting-eligible population). But thanks to the Electoral College, this relative lack of civic participation is never punished in the presidential election process. Each state’s say in who becomes president remains constant based on population, regardless of how much money or volunteer time was spent to turn out voters. This is exactly as it should be. California is too important to the nation to discount its electoral clout based on a freak occurrence in a single election that leads to low voter turnout there or a surge in turnout elsewhere due to some local issue or a competitive down-ballot race.
Indeed, considering racial disparities in voter participation — eligible whites were 10% more likely to vote than eligible blacks, and nearly 33% more likely to vote than eligible Hispanics and Asians in 2016 — a switch to electing presidents by national popular vote would actually disempower racial minorities.
In short, this is a dumb idea that started off too clever by half and failed to take most of the data into account. Even so, if liberals are hell-bent on fundamentally changing the way presidents are elected, they need to do it the hard way, by changing minds, winning elections, and amending the Constitution. There are no hacks or shortcuts allowed.
