The project has been supported by editorials in newspapers, including
The New York Times,
The Boston Globe, and the Minneapolis
Star Tribune, arguing that the existing system discourages voter turnout and leaves emphasis on only a few states and a few issues, while a popular election would equalize voting power. Others have argued against it, including the
Honolulu Star-Bulletin. A collection of readings pro and con has been assembled by the
League of Women Voters. Some of the most common points of debate are detailed below:
Protective function of the Electoral College Certain
founders, notably
Alexander Hamilton and
James Madison, conceived of the Electoral College as a deliberative body which would weigh the inputs of the states, but not be bound by them, in selecting the president, and would therefore serve to protect the country from the election of a person who is unfit to be president. However, the Electoral College has never served such a role in practice. From 1796 onward, presidential electors have acted as "rubber stamps" for their parties' nominees. Journalist and commentator
Peter Beinart has cited the election of Donald Trump, whom some, he notes, view as unfit, as evidence that the Electoral College does not perform a protective function. , no election outcome has been determined by an elector deviating from the will of their state. Furthermore, thirty-two states and the District of Columbia have laws to prevent such "
faithless electors", and such laws were upheld as constitutional by the
Supreme Court in 2020 in
Chiafalo v. Washington. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact does not eliminate the Electoral College or affect faithless elector laws; it merely changes how electors are pledged by the participating states. Critics of the compact argue that candidates would have less incentive to focus on regions with smaller populations or fewer urban areas, and would thus be less motivated to address rural issues.
Disputed results and electoral fraud Opponents of the compact have raised concerns about the handling of close or disputed outcomes. National Popular Vote contends that an election being decided based on a disputed tally is far
less likely under the NPVIC, which creates one large nationwide pool of voters, than under the current system, in which the national winner may be determined by an extremely small margin in any one of the fifty-one smaller statewide tallies. Under the NPVIC, each state will continue to handle disputes and statewide
recounts as governed by their own laws. The NPVIC does not include any provision for a nationwide recount, though Congress has the authority to create such a provision. Pete du Pont argues that the NPVIC would enable
electoral fraud, stating, "Mr.
Gore's 540,000-vote margin [in
the 2000 election] amounted to 3.1 votes in each of the country's 175,000 precincts. 'Finding' three votes per precinct in urban areas is not a difficult thing...".
New Yorker essayist
Hendrik Hertzberg concluded that the NPVIC would benefit neither party, noting that historically both Republicans and Democrats have been successful in winning the popular vote in presidential elections. A statistical analysis by
FiveThirtyEights
Nate Silver of all presidential elections from 1864 to 2016 (see adjacent chart) found that the Electoral College has not consistently favored one major party or the other, and that any advantage in the Electoral College does not tend to last long, noting that "there's almost no correlation between which party has the Electoral College advantage in one election and which has it four years later." In all four elections since 1876 in which
the winner lost the popular vote, the Republican became president; however, Silver's analysis shows that such splits are about equally likely to favor either major party.
State power relative to population There is some debate over whether the Electoral College favors low- or high-population states. Those who argue that the College favors low-population states point out that such states have proportionally more electoral votes relative to their populations. , the least populous state – Wyoming, with three electors – has 3.3 times the proportion of electoral votes as it does of the population of the 50 states and Washington, D.C.; the most populous state, California, has 16% less. Thus, citizens of Wyoming each control more electoral votes than citizens of California. In contrast, the NPVIC would give equal weight to each voter's ballot, regardless of what state they live in. Others, however, believe that since most states award electoral votes on a winner-takes-all system (the "unit rule"), the potential of populous states to shift greater numbers of electoral votes gives them more clout than would be expected from their electoral vote count alone. Some opponents of a national popular vote contend that the non-proportionality of the Electoral College is a fundamental component of the federal system established by the Constitutional Convention. Specifically, the
Connecticut Compromise established a
bicameral legislature – with proportional representation of the states in the House of Representatives and equal representation of the states in the Senate – as a compromise between less populous states fearful of having their interests dominated and voices drowned out by larger states, and larger states which viewed anything other than proportional representation as an affront to principles of democratic representation. The ratio of the populations of the most and least populous states is far greater currently (68.50 ) than when the Connecticut Compromise was adopted (7.35 as of the
1790 census), exaggerating the non-proportional component of the compromise allocation.
Irrelevance of state-level majorities Three governors who have vetoed NPVIC legislation—
Arnold Schwarzenegger of California,
Linda Lingle of Hawaii, and
Steve Sisolak of Nevada—objected to the compact on the grounds that it could require their states' electoral votes to be awarded to a candidate who did not win a majority in their state. (California and Hawaii have since enacted laws joining the compact.) Supporters of the compact counter that under a national popular vote system, state-level majorities are irrelevant; in all states, votes contribute to the nationwide tally, which determines the winner. Individual votes combine to directly determine the outcome, while the intermediary measure of state-level majorities is rendered obsolete.
Proliferation of candidates Some opponents of the compact contend that it would lead to a proliferation of third-party candidates, such that an election could be won with a plurality of as little as 15% of the vote. However, evidence from U.S. gubernatorial and other plurality-based races does not bear out this suggestion. In the 1,975 general elections for governor in the U.S. between 1948 and 2011, 90% of winners received more than 50% of the vote, 99% received more than 40%, and all received more than 35%. Currently, parties in power have an incentive to create state rules meant to skew the
relative turnout for each party in their favor, by, for example, making voting more difficult for groups that tend to vote against them. Under NPVIC, this incentive may be reduced, as electoral votes will no longer be rewarded on the basis of statewide vote totals, but on nationwide results, which are less likely to be significantly affected by the voting rules of any one state. Under the compact, however, there may be an incentive for states to create rules that make voting easier for all, to increase their
total turnout, and thus their impact on the nationwide vote totals. In either system, the voting rules of each state have the potential to affect the election outcome for the entire country. ==Constitutionality==