Amending the Electoral College: The National Vote Interstate Compact

            Since the 2016 presidential election, impassioned calls to throw out the Electoral College system and instead use some other system such as a popular vote have garnered fierce partisan debate, especially as the next presidential election cycle draws closer. However, many state legislatures are seeking to change the Electoral College system internally by instead passing into law bills that include them into the National Vote Interstate Compact.

            While the Constitution explicitly calls for an Electoral College with specific electors from each state, it does not specify a winner-take-all system that almost all states adhere to. Article II Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution states that “each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.” At no point is there any clause that mandates that states’ electoral votes must be a winner-takes-all system. Both Nebraska and Maine have in fact already enacted systems that allow for some popular vote electors during the presidential election. These states use the congressional district method, which allows them to “allocate two electoral votes to the state popular vote winner, and then one electoral vote to the popular vote winner in each Congressional district” (270towin.com 2019).

            The National Vote Interstate Compact differs from Nebraska and Maine in that if the bill was adopted by enough states to guarantee a 270 electoral vote majority, all electors within those states would vote for the candidate who won the national popular vote. Though proponents of the compact have been primarily Democrats, this issue could easily become a more bipartisan effort as each person’s vote no matter the state they resided in would meaningfully contribute to electing the next president. Saul Anuzis and Michael Steele, the former a past chairman for the Michigan Republican Party and the latter a past chairman for the Republican National Party both endorse the National Popular Vote as a way to escape shifting demographics within the Electoral College. Fears that Texas and Florida could soon lean more solidly Democratic could end any attempt at a Republican presidency in the near future, but with the National Popular Vote, “a Republican could probably survive a narrow popular vote loss in Texas or Florida and still win the presidency, because every GOP vote in those states would still count toward a national popular vote majority” (Anuzis and Steele 2019).

One of the main arguments in favor of a National Popular Vote system that usually heralds much more Democrat support is that it supports democratic notions that the majority of the people should pick the president. In his argument for changing the U.S. Senate to proportional representation, Sanford Levinson contends that “the constitution is both insufficiently democratic, in a country that professes to believe in democracy, and significantly dysfunctional, in terms of the quality of government that we receive” (Toobin 2013). The current electoral system dissuades political minorities from voting in states where there is a clear party majority while only incentivizing votes in a select few swing states. In a National Popular Vote system, repressed Republicans in California can be incentivized to participate and have their voices heard just the same as Democratic voters in West Virginia.

            Other arguments defending a national popular vote electoral system dispel myths such as that only large cities would have a say over who would become president. In fact, the top 50 cities in the U.S. only constitute 15 percent of the total population, which means candidates would still need to campaign in rural areas and therefore broaden political participation from just a few key swing states already present in the current system (Mackowiak 2019). Many would contend that such an overturning of the longstanding winner-take-all system would be almost impossible to do, especially in such a polarized climate. Aside from the notion that similar electoral changes have occurred in the past such as “the Seventeenth Amendment [democratizing] the Senate by replacing indirect elections with direct elections,” this change wouldn’t even require a constitutional amendment (Adler, Jenkins, and Shipan pg. 37 2019).  On the contrary, the National Vote Interstate Compact could take effect within the next decade because as of February 2019, enough states which control over 172 electoral votes have already joined the movement as shown in Figure 1.  

Figure 1.

            While such a change to how the Electoral College’s votes are apportioned is reasonably possible, there have been recent challenges to passed bills in certain states. For instance, Nevada’s governor vetoed the bill and although Colorado passed the bill into law in 2019, a petition has garnered enough signatures to put a ballot repeal to be voted on in 2020. The repeal of Colorado joining the National Vote Interstate Compact could be the turning point nationally for the effort (Staver 2019). Regardless of party, the Electoral College’s winner-take-all system is clearly less than ideal and disincentivizes participation from voters of political minorities in both Republican and Democratic states while only incentivizing turnout in a particular few swing states. The National Vote Interstate Compact could be the bipartisan solution to an increasingly critiqued system while safely remaining removed from amending the Constitution in such a hyperpolarized political climate.

Works Cited

Adler, Scott, Jeffery A. Jenkins, and Charles R. Shipan, The United States Congress, (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019), 37.

Mackowiak, Matt, “Facts support national popular vote,” 8 Sept 2019, accessed at https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/460425-facts-support-national-popular-vote, 17 Sept 2019.

n.a., “Split Electoral Votes in Maine and Nebraska,” 2019, accessed at https://www.270towin. com/content/split-electoral-votes-maine-and-nebraska/, 17 Sept 2019.

Staver, Anna, “A repeal of Colorado’s new national popular vote law appears headed to the November 2020 ballot,” 22 July 2019, accessed at https://www.denverpost.com/ 2019/07/22/colorado-national-popular-vote-law-appears-headed-november-ballot-2020/,17 Sept 2019.

Toobin, Jeffrey, "Our Broken Constitution,” 1 Dec 2013, accessed at https://newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/09/our-broken-constitution, 17 Sept 2019.

Wolf, Stephen, “Here's how we could replace the Electoral College with a national popular vote by 2024,” 14 Feb 2019, accessed at https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/2/14/ 1834548/-Here-s-how-we-could-replace-the-Electoral-College-with-a-national-popular-vote-by-2024, 17 Sept 2019.