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The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is an agreement among a group of U.S. states and the District of Columbia to award all their electoral votes to whichever presidential ticket wins the overall popular vote in the 50 states and the District of Columbia, regardless of which ticket won more votes in their individual state/district. Introduced in 2006, the compact is designed to ensure that the candidate who receives the most votes nationwide is elected president, and it would come into effect only when it would guarantee that outcome.
It has been joined by states and the District of Columbia . They have electoral votes, which is of the Electoral College and of the 270 votes needed to give the compact legal force. The idea gained traction amongst scholars after George W. Bush won the presidential election but lost the popular vote in 2000, the first time the winner of the presidency had lost the popular vote since 1888.
Certain legal questions may affect implementation of the compact. Some legal observers believe states have plenary power to appoint electors as prescribed by the compact; others believe that the compact will require congressional consent under the Constitution's Compact Clause or that the presidential election process cannot be altered except by a constitutional amendment.
Mechanism Taking the form of an interstate compact, the agreement would go into effect among participating states only after they collectively represent an absolute majority of votes (currently at least 270) in the Electoral College. Once in effect, in each presidential election the participating states would award all of their electoral votes to the candidate with the largest national popular vote total across the 50 states and the District of Columbia. As a result, that candidate would win the presidency by securing a majority of votes in the Electoral College. Until the compact's conditions are met, all states award electoral votes in their current manner.
The compact would modify the way participating states implement Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution, which requires each state legislature to define a method to appoint its electors to vote in the Electoral College. The Constitution does not mandate any particular legislative scheme for selecting electors, and instead vests state legislatures with the exclusive power to choose how to allocate their states' electors (although systems that violate the 14th Amendment, which mandates equal protection of the law and prohibits racial discrimination, are prohibited).McPherson v. Blacker States have chosen various methods of allocation over the years, with regular changes in the nation's early decades. Today, all but two states (Maine and Nebraska) award all their electoral votes to the single candidate with the most votes statewide (the so-called "winner-take-all" system).
The compact would no longer be in effect should the total number of electoral votes held by the participating states fall below the threshold required, which could occur due to withdrawal of one or more states, changes due to the decennial congressional re-apportionment, or an increase in the size of Congress, for example by admittance of a 51st state. The compact mandates a July 20 deadline in presidential election years, six months before Inauguration Day, to determine whether the agreement is in effect for that particular election. Any withdrawal by a state after that deadline will not be considered effective by other participating states until the next president is confirmed.
Motivation
Reasons given for the compact include:
The current Electoral College system allows a candidate to win the Presidency while losing the popular vote, an outcome seen as counter to the one person, one vote principle of democracy.
This happened in the elections of 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016. (The 1960 election is also a disputed example.) Whether these splits suggest an advantage for one major party or the other in the Electoral College is discussed in below.
{| class="wikitable sortable" |+ Elections in which the popular vote winner lost ! scope="col" | Election ! scope="col" colspan="4" class="unsortable" | Election winner ! scope="col" colspan="4" class="unsortable" | Popular vote winner ! scope="col" colspan="2" | Difference ! scope="col" | Turnout |- ! scope="row" | 1824 | | style="text-align: left;" | J. Q. Adams |30.9% |113,122 | | style="text-align: left;" | Jackson |41.4% |157,271 |10.5% |44,149 |26.9% |- ! scope="row" | 1876 | | style="text-align: left;" | Hayes |47.9% |4,034,311 | | style="text-align: left;" | Tilden |50.9% |4,288,546 |3.0% |254,235 |82.6% |- ! scope="row" | 1888 | | style="text-align: left;" | B. Harrison |47.8% |5,443,892 | | style="text-align: left;" | Cleveland |48.6% |5,534,488 |0.8% |90,596 |80.5% |- ! scope="row" | 2000 | | style="text-align: left;" | G. W. Bush |47.9% |50,456,002 | | style="text-align: left;" | Gore |48.4% |50,999,897 |0.5% |543,895 |54.2% |- ! scope="row" | 2016 | | style="text-align: left;" | Trump |46.1% |62,984,828 | | style="text-align: left;" | H. Clinton |48.2% |65,853,514 |2.1% |2,868,686 |60.1%
Enactment prospects
Political analyst Nate Silver noted in 2014 that all jurisdictions that had adopted the compact at that time were blue states, and that there were not enough electoral votes from the remaining blue states to achieve the required majority. He concluded that, as swing states were unlikely to support a compact that reduces their influence (see § Campaign focus on swing states), the compact could not succeed without adoption by some red states as well. Republican-led chambers have adopted the measure in New York (2011), Oklahoma (2014), and Arizona (2016), and the measure has been unanimously approved by Republican-led committees in Georgia and Missouri, prior to the 2016 election. On March 15, 2019, Colorado became the most "purple" state to join the compact, though no Republican legislators supported the bill and Colorado had a state government trifecta under Democrats. It was later submitted to a ballot initiative, where it was approved by 52% of voters. Since then, several "purpler" states have joined the compact through the additions of New Mexico, Maine, Minnesota, and Virginia. The "swing" state of Nevada passed legislation to join the compact when it had a Democratic government trifecta, but required the legislation to be passed again in 2025, which it did not.
In addition to the adoption threshold, the NPVIC raises potential legal issues, discussed in , that may draw challenges to the compact.
Debate over effects The project has been supported by editorials in newspapers, including The New York Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune, arguing that the existing system discourages voter turnout and leaves emphasis on only a few states and a few issues, while a popular election would equalize voting power. Others have argued against it, including the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Pete du Pont, a former governor of Delaware, in an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, called the project an "urban power grab" that would shift politics entirely to urban issues in high population states and allow lower caliber candidates to run. A collection of readings pro and con has been assembled by the League of Women Voters. Some of the most common points of debate are detailed below:
Protective function of the Electoral College Certain founders, notably Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, conceived of the Electoral College as a deliberative body which would weigh the inputs of the states, but not be bound by them, in selecting the president, and would therefore serve to protect the country from the election of a person who is unfit to be president. However, the Electoral College has never served such a role in practice. From 1796 onward, presidential electors have acted as "rubber stamps" for their parties' nominees. Journalist and commentator Peter Beinart has cited the election of Donald Trump, whom some, he notes, view as unfit, as evidence that the Electoral College does not perform a protective function. , no election outcome has been determined by an elector deviating from the will of their state. Furthermore, thirty-two states and the District of Columbia have laws to prevent such "faithless electors", and such laws were upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court in 2020 in Chiafalo v. Washington. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact does not eliminate the Electoral College or affect faithless elector laws; it merely changes how electors are pledged by the participating states.
Campaign focus on swing states
+ Focus of major-party candidates in the final stretch of the 2004 presidential campaign (September 26 – November 2, 2004)Spending on advertising per capita:
Campaign visits per 1 million residents:
Under the current system, campaign focus – as measured by spending, visits, and attention to regional or state issues – is largely limited to the few swing states whose electoral outcomes are competitive, with politically "solid" states mostly ignored by the campaigns. The adjacent maps illustrate the amount spent on advertising and the number of visits to each state, relative to population, by the two major-party candidates in the last stretch of the 2004 presidential campaign. Supporters of the compact contend that a national popular vote would encourage candidates to campaign with equal effort for votes in competitive and non-competitive states alike. Critics of the compact argue that candidates would have less incentive to focus on regions with smaller populations or fewer urban areas, and would thus be less motivated to address rural issues.
Disputed results and electoral fraud Opponents of the compact have raised concerns about the handling of close or disputed outcomes. National Popular Vote contends that an election being decided based on a disputed tally is far less likely under the NPVIC, which creates one large nationwide pool of voters, than under the current system, in which the national winner may be determined by an extremely small margin in any one of the fifty-one smaller statewide tallies. However, the national popular vote can theoretically be closer than the vote tally within any one state. In the event of an exact tie in the nationwide tally, NPVIC member states will award their electors to the winner of the popular vote in their state. Under the NPVIC, each state will continue to handle disputes and statewide recounts as governed by their own laws. The NPVIC does not include any provision for a nationwide recount, though Congress has the authority to create such a provision.
Former Governor Pete du Pont argued that the NPVIC would enable electoral fraud, stating, "Mr. Gore's 540,000-vote margin [in the 2000 election] amounted to 3.1 votes in each of the country's 175,000 precincts. 'Finding' three votes per precinct in urban areas is not a difficult thing...". However, National Popular Vote counters that altering the outcome via fraud would be more difficult under a national popular vote than under the current system, due to the greater number of total votes that would likely need to be fraudulently altered: currently, a close election may be determined by the outcome in only a few close states (see tipping-point state), and the margin in the closest of those states is likely to be far smaller than the nationwide margin, due to the smaller pool of voters at the state level, and the fact that several states may be capable of tipping the election.
Suggested partisan advantage