Most of the recent news coming out of Virginia has centered on efforts by Governor Abigail Spanberger and her Democrat accomplices in the legislature to override the state constitution, abolish Virginia’s bipartisan redistricting commission, and impose a radical gerrymander on the Commonwealth. Yet another bill adding Virginia to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC), which Spanberger is soon expected to sign into law, is potentially just as damaging – not only to Virginia’s Constitution, but the U.S. Constitution as well.
For those who may be unfamiliar with it, the NPVIC is an ongoing strategy by Democrat states to neutralize that pesky Electoral College. According to its handy one-page explainer, “The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact will guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It will apply the one-person-one-vote principle to presidential elections and make every vote equal.”
How will it achieve this? Through a formal agreement among states controlling 270 or more presidential electors to cast all of their Electoral College votes for the ticket that wins the national popular vote – regardless of who wins in the individual states. For instance, if Virginia had been in the NPVIC in the 2024 election and it had been in effect, Virginia would’ve been forced to pledge its 13 electoral votes to Donald Trump, despite the fact that Kamala Harris won Virginia by about six points.
In short, it’s an end-run around the Constitution to effectively abolish the Electoral College and institute a nationwide popular vote for president – without going through the proper process of amending the Constitution itself.
Originally launched in response to the Electoral College victory (271-266) of Republican George W. Bush despite losing the nationwide popular vote by 537,179 to Democrat Al Gore, the NPVIC was sold as an effort to ensure that presidential elections are more “democratic.” But it is in reality a scheme to endow the high-population, Democrat-dominated regions of the country with even more political power than they already wield.
The NPVIC got off to a slow start, but 17 states and the District of Columbia have now joined. The following list of current members and their number of presidential electors will be all too familiar:
California (54), Colorado (10), Connecticut (7), Delaware (3), Hawaii (4), Illinois (19), Maine (4), Maryland (10), Massachusetts (11), Minnesota (10), New Jersey (14), New Mexico (5), New York (28), Oregon (8), Rhode Island (4), Vermont (3), Washington (12), and the District of Columbia (3).
When Virginia joins, its 13 electors will raise the NPVIC’s cumulative electoral total to 222, leaving the NPVIC 48 short of the needed electors. If they ever hit the magic number, the NPVIC states will claim the right to choose the president regardless of how the rest of the country votes.
Of course, such an outcome would undoubtedly be subject to legal action, as the NPVIC conflicts with at least two constitutional provisions, including the 12th Amendment, which states:
“The Electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for President … and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate — The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all certificates and the votes shall then be counted … the person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President if such number be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed.”
The 12th Amendment was adopted for the purpose of preventing what the NPVIC is designed to accomplish. This is why it begins with the words, “The electors shall meet in their respective states.” Its purpose is to prevent combinations by any group of states to dilute the electoral influence of others. The NPVIC also runs afoul of the Constitution’s “Compact Clause,” which forbids states from entering into compacts with other states without the consent of Congress. This clause is meant to prevent states from forming cartels. That violation, as Thomas Jipping of the Heritage Foundation explains, is the surreptitious purpose of the NPVIC:
“While maintaining the façade of the Electoral College, the NPV compact would reduce the body of states that elect the President from the ‘United States of America’ to the ‘NPV compact states.’ These few states would be the only ones with an actual, genuine role in electing the President. They would not simply contribute to the presidential election outcome, as every state does in the Electoral College system—but would literally dictate that outcome… In this, the NPV compact is like a political cartel.”
It goes without saying that these violations of the Constitution would produce an avalanche of lawsuits from Republican states. The ensuing litigation would certainly result in a Supreme Court battle that would be far more arcane than Bush v. Gore, and the inevitable ruling against the NPVIC would result in a Democrat reaction that would make even their most unhinged antics to date seem rational by comparison.
Moreover, even if the constitutional issues raised by the compact could somehow be resolved amicably, there is virtually no possibility that the Democrat signatories to the NPVIC would honor the compact if a Republican won the popular vote.
All of this could be avoided if the Democrats were truly interested in “one person, one vote.” That goal could be accomplished without the convoluted process proposed by advocates of the NPVIC. The states could pursue reform by simply choosing to allocate their electoral votes proportionally. Nebraska and Maine have already changed their allocation systems to something approximating this method, and it creates no conflict with the Constitution. It would, however, reduce the electoral power that the big Democrat states wield. If California went to such a system, at least 20 of its 54 electoral votes would go to the Republicans.
This is why no Democrat-controlled state would dream of going to a fully proportional system. It is why they have concocted the unconstitutional and undemocratic National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. They aren’t interested in genuine electoral reform. They want to shift more power to heavily populated, Democrat-dominated regions (which, conveniently, have an atrocious record on election integrity) and keep the electoral advantage they already possess in large states like California, New York, and Illinois.
The NPVIC is, in other words, just another Democrat attempt to rig a game they can’t win honestly. And now Virginia’s new Democrat governor and her legislative accomplices want in on the scam.
David Catron is a Senior Editor at the American Spectator. His writing has also appeared in PJ Media, the American Thinker, the Providence Journal, the Catholic Exchange and a variety of other publications.
