If it is wrong to reapportion the popular vote under the Electoral College, as some critics claim, then how does it suddenly become right to reapportion the popular vote under a national compact?
It doesn’t.
That’s just an exercise in hypocrisy.
Supporters of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact object to the Electoral College mechanism of assigning weight to smaller states in a national election.
They have proposed a mechanism in which every state that signs onto the compact pledges in advance to support whichever candidates win the national popular vote.
Theoretically, even if Virginia voters overwhelmingly favored Candidate B, the state’s representatives in the Electoral College would be obligated to support Candidate A if Candidate A won the national popular vote.
Virginians’ preferences would be case aside.
Of course, supporters of the interstate compact claim that’s what’s happening now.
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But their solution is to circumvent the current system by imposing a second system that does the same thing — only more egregiously.
They can’t explain satisfactorily why it makes sense to take what they consider to be a bad system, and then double down on its supposed flaw.
In our constitutional republic as established by the Founders, presidents and vice presidents are not elected directly by popular vote. Instead, the people’s vote is transferred to electors from each state, who then cast the final decisions.
The number of electors is based on each state’s representation in Congress. In the House, population determines the number of representatives each state has — and therefore the number of electors. In the Senate, each state is equal in the number of senators who represent it — two — and in the number of electors drawn from that number. Because Senate representation is not based on population, the electoral system grants smaller states a slightly more powerful impact than their populations alone would have warranted.
The Founders established this apportionment of votes — representatives according to population, senators based on equality — in order to quell concerns of small states, which feared being overwhelmed in the new government by the political concerns of the large states. (Virginia was one of the big, powerful states at that time.)
The Founders found logic in the small states’ argument, and they also saw the value of compromising with the small states — especially since resistance might prevent the new government from being solidified and, instead, would spell the end of the fragile young country.
A similar argument can be made today. A departure from the Electoral College system would mean that small states would be overlooked in the political scheme of things. The current apportionment of electors means that presidential candidates at least have to pay some attention to smaller states, and take the concerns of their voters into some account.
Instead, the national compact would concentrate power to the powerful. The more votes a candidate gets, the more votes he or she would be guaranteed to receive from the member states. This concentration of power is not good for democracy.
What’s more, this isn’t even the conversation we should be having at this point.
If the nation wishes to move from a constitutional republic to a popular democracy, we should be debating that question in all its complexity.
And if the nation wishes to elimination the Electoral College, it should do should so through the direct channels set up in the U.S. Constitution — through a constitutional amendment.
Indeed, some legal experts say the national compact is unconstitutional and won’t survive a court challenge.
In any case, even if the compact is not constitutionally flawed, it is morally flawed.
At least under the current system, Virginia gets to decide how to use its electoral votes.
Under the compact, that power would be handed over to others and apportioned based not on what Virginians want, but rather on voters’ decisions elsewhere in the country.
And that just isn’t right.
