Imagine casting your ballot for president, watching your state’s returns come in, and then finding out that your vote, and those of the majority of your state’s citizens, didn’t just not count, but that they were flipped to count for the candidate that lost your state. The flip didn’t happen by a recount. But by a compact your legislature signed years ago, quietly, with almost no one watching.
That’s not a hypothetical. It’s what the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is designed to do. And it’s closer to becoming law than most Americans realize.
The NPVIC is an agreement among certain states to award all of their state electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the national popular vote, regardless of who that state’s own voters choose. Eighteen states plus Washington, D.C. have already signed on, representing 222 electoral votes. Only a handful of additional states need to join to trigger the compact’s required 270 electoral votes and bind every member state to a system that can override its own citizens and ultimately undermine how the U.S. chooses its president.
The NPVIC doesn’t protect member state voters; it disenfranchises them. So why would policymakers push a plan that nullifies their own constituents’ votes? Because the actual target is not “fairness.” It’s the Electoral College itself, and beneath that, the entire constitutional idea that America is a union of sovereign states, not a single undifferentiated mass of voters counted from a national ledger.
The NPVIC is a backdoor repeal of Article II, engineered to avoid the one thing the Constitution actually requires for a change this fundamental: a constitutional amendment, debated openly and ratified by three-quarters of the states. The founders considered, and rejected, direct national election of the president. Not because they doubted the wisdom of voters, but because they understood a simple truth that still holds today: a candidate who only needs to win the raw national vote count has no reason to ever set foot in a small or rural state again.
Why campaign in Iowa, Wyoming, or West Virginia when you can bank more votes faster after canvassing dense blocks in Los Angeles or New York City? Under the NPVIC, entire regions of this country, and the industries, communities and concerns that define them, become irrelevant to a presidential campaign. Farmers, small manufacturers and rural families wouldn’t be a constituency to win.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
