The news went unnoticed, but it was significant. On April 15, Maine became the 17th American state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC), an agreement by which signatories pledge to prevent a candidate from being declared the winner of the presidential election without having won a majority of votes nationwide. Such a configuration has occurred five times in American history: in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016.
In each state, when voters check the box for their preferred presidential candidate, they are actually electing a list of electors, whose number is equal to that state’s number of seats in Congress. To be elected president, a candidate must receive at least 270 votes in the Electoral College: Half plus one of the 538 members of the Electoral College. Since each state has two senators, regardless of population size, not all votes are equal.
The NPVIC aims to remedy this anomaly. In a country where any change to the Constitution is destined to fail, the idea of a voluntary compact would bypass the ratification hurdle. The agreement would be activated when the 270-vote threshold is reached.
Popular idea
Thanks to Maine (with four electors) and Minnesota (10), the Compact now has 209 votes in 17 states, plus the District of Columbia (three electors). Its supporters acknowledge that the road ahead is long, but they point out that the Compact, launched in 2006, represented just 134 votes 10 years ago. Born of the work of three eminent constitutional law experts after the defeat of Democrat Al Gore in 2000, the idea is rather popular. In 2020, Colorado voters were asked to decide whether their state should join, and 52% of them approved.
There’s no shortage of arguments in favor of the popular vote. In 2016, Trump won 304 Electoral College votes to Hillary Clinton’s 227. He was declared the winner even though she led him in the national popular vote by 2,868,686 votes. The same thing happened in 2000 when the Supreme Court gave George W. Bush victory in Florida – and therefore the presidency – by interrupting the recount of votes in the state. Gore, his rival, was ahead of him by more than 500,000 votes nationally. Incidentally, Bush was the last Republican to win the popular vote, in 2004.
According to the calculations of advocates for the popular vote, it would only have taken 21,461 voters changing their minds for Biden to be defeated in 2020 (5,229 in Arizona, 5,890 in Georgia and 10,342 in Wisconsin), even though he had gathered a total of 7 million more votes than Trump. Supporters of the reform argue that the current system encourages doubt, controversy over results and post-election disputes.
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