Virginia Surrenders to the National Popular Vote Movement
The Electoral College provides a brilliant safeguard for the republic and must be guarded.
On April 14, Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) signed Virginia into the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC), which brings the total electoral votes in the compact to 222. Only 48 electoral votes remain to trigger the scheme that would award every participating state’s electors to the national popular-vote winner—neutering the Electoral College.
The Founders did not create the Electoral College by accident. Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution gives states the power to appoint electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” They engineered this deliberately to protect the rights of smaller states that were naturally skeptical of entering into a union with states that were much more populous. A popular vote would have handed the presidency to the largest states and the most populous cities, leaving the residents of smaller states and rural regions with little motivation to vote.
The NPVIC represents a dangerous attempt to gut the Constitution without having to amend it.
The Electoral College, by contrast, forces candidates to build broad, geographically diverse coalitions. The United States was not founded as a unitary, monolithic democracy, but a federal republic—and the Electoral College protects that form of government.
NPVIC supporters know they cannot muster enough support to abolish the Electoral College through amendment, so it seeks to bypass it through a patchwork of state pledges.
Abolishing the Electoral College Would Destroy Small State Influence Entirely
Not all small states are similar, but even those that differ politically have much in common. For instance, most rely greatly on agriculture or niche industry like forestry. Most rural Republicans and Democrats value the Second Amendment and hunting rights, an issue on which most urban voters differ.
A great danger of the NPVIC is that, thanks to the poor quality of civics education, many Americans are buying the argument that a national popular vote would improve elected officials’ accountability to the people. In reality, the opposite would occur. Presidents would win elections by campaigning in the most populous urban areas, ignoring not only the rural areas of those states—think upstate New York—but ignoring most states that lack a major metropolitan center.
It’s no surprise that Maine’s House of Representatives voted last year, with the help of three Democrats and two Independents, to pull that state out of the NPVIC. Although it failed in the state senate, it revealed that some small state Democrats understand the practical danger of joining such a compact. If the NPVIC ever reaches 270 electoral votes, a de facto abolition of the Electoral College would invalidate the concerns of small-state citizens. Under such a system, most of these voters would never interact with a presidential candidate unless they traveled to the nearest major city.
Under a national popular vote, a Democrat who racks up huge margins in New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago could win the White House without ever setting foot in Virginia or Maine.
This system would erase state sovereignty to the point of reducing states to the status of counties under federal control. The Electoral College aims to prevent exactly this kind of centralization.
Besides of the unfairness of such a system, national popular vote proponents should consider the danger this creates for civil unrest. Much of the glue that binds citizens together is the sense that they have some control over who governs them. Once the consent of the governed is diluted and it appears to a large minority that they have no chance of influencing the outcome of an election, the social contract begins to break down.
The Founders did not create the Electoral College in a scheme to concentrate power in the hands of a few elites. If that had been their goal, they would have implemented a national popular vote as Spanberger and her Democratic pals want. This would have allowed Virginia, New York, and Pennsylvania to control the presidency, forever shutting out the other 10 original states that were smaller. Today, adopting a national popular vote would guarantee the country chafes under the rule of the largest cities and that presidents cater to the whims of urban citizens without needing to balance the interests of all Americans.
Maintaining the Electoral College is essential to maintaining America’s republican form of government. It is crucial that civic-minded elected officials make this a central plank in their platform in every state.
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