What's really annoying is how close we came to abolishing the electoral college, that 3 segregationists were able to halt almost univeral consensus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_abolition_am...

What you could do is do something like national popular vote weighted by electoral college delegates, because then you could get everyone but the swing states, and that would represent a majority. And then you're not disenfranchising half of both California and Texas.

Twice in the past two decades, the Electoral College has gone red when the popular vote would have gone blue, by a nontrivial margin. That leaves an avenue open whereby some state's legislators fall on their swords to fix that problem.

Whether it would stick is an open question -- they'd almost certainly face an angry campaign against them, and the swing back could undo it. So it's unlikely. But there is a route by which it could happen, since the state's benefit from the EC is mitigated by the distortion it causes.

EDIT: if you can get that many states to agree to it, then you could have just done a constitutional amendment. since all you need for that is for the states to agree, and the senate to agree. Senators come from the states.

So... if you can't get it passed that way, it doesn't pass the smell test.

There is considerable debate about that.

> States are not allowed to make agreements with each other parallel to the system.

Yes, they are. In certain circumstances, such agreements require affirmative Congressional consent, though its questionable if the National Popular Vote "Interstate Compact" would meet the standards for requiring such consent, whether it would require only negative consent, or whether it would be outside of Congress' authority because of the assignment of the power of choosing electors.

> if you can get that many states to agree to it, then you could have just done a constitutional amendment

No, that's not at all necessarily even approximately true. For it to be effective, you need jurisdictions with a bare majority of electoral votes to implement it. For a constitutional amendment, you need 3/4 of states.

The minimum number of states to hit a majority of EVs is 16, as opposed to 38 for a constitutional amendment.

> since all you need for that is for the states to agree, and the senate to agree.

You don't need the Senate to agree to a Constitutional Amendment. You need 3/4 of state legislatures to agree. You can propose a constitutional amendment with 2/3 of both houses of Congress, or call a Constitutional Convention on the application of 2/3 of states.

Both proposal and ratification (presuming senators vote in line with their states, regardless of the House) have a higher minimum threshold than would be otherwise required for states representing a majority of EVs to assign electors in line with the national popular vote and determine Presidential elections that way.

Uh, no. 38 states have to ratify an amendment in order for it to take effect. You can easily eclipse 270 electoral votes without getting the support of 38 states.

Specifically:

>No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, ... , enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State

In this case, since such a deal is changing how the president is elected, and changing the balance of power between states and the fed, it could probably be seen as encroaching on federal power. So simply getting congress to pass a resolution approving it (which in theory would solve the "consent of congress") wouldn't fly like it would with an interstate compact dealing with something more mundane and less political like water rights, or mutual deal on air pollution between several neighboring states.

Disclaimer: IANAL, this is not legal advice etc.

2) the part that says no interstate compacts without express approval of congress

Neither of those is actually necessary because the states decide on their own how their electoral college votes are allocated. In principle Texas or California could allocate their delegates proportional to the popular vote of the people in that state.

Which might be in the interests of the people in that state, because then candidates would actually bother to solicit votes there. But you'd have to convince a local government controlled by one party to give about a third of the state's electoral college delegates to the other party.

If two states with 10 electoral votes each are both currently winner takes all, but one votes green and one votes purple; and if only the green state changes to proportional allocation, you move from a scenario where both parties got 10 votes each to a scenario where the green state went 6/4 for green and the purple state is still all 10 votes purple, basically kneecapping the green party.

Moreover, both of the parties are a product of the election map. If the map changes, it doesn't destroy one of the parties, it changes both of them, to get the balance back. If Republicans started getting 20 of California's delegates, Democrats would change their policies until they were getting those 20 back somewhere else. They'd stop pussyfooting around on climate change so they can save Florida from ending up underwater and put those 29 in the solid blue column, or dump a big jobs program in Ohio and get those, or start paying attention to the plight of the rural poor.

Or the Republicans would realize they could stand to lose some votes they currently have to get, stop being so inconsistent about at the same time claiming to want smaller government while never actually making it smaller, and actually gore somebody's ox.

You need 270 to win. 300 means you gave somebody something you didn't have to. 240 means you didn't give somebody something you did have to.

> If Republicans started getting 20 of California's delegates, Democrats would change their policies until they were getting those 20 back somewhere else.

So what you're saying is they'd change tack to not pay as much attention to California, which is supposedly going to benefit Californians.

But that doesn't matter because the specific individuals who would have to enact is are just as much if not more beholden to their party than to the the people.

I agree with what you said about changing the parties policies though.

The supreme court has said (over-simplifying here) that the right to delegate this legislative power to a popular vote is only constitutional when it adheres to 1 person, 1 vote weighting.

Taking into account votes external to that state likely violates this.

> Taking into account votes external to that state likely violates this.

I don't see anything approximating an argument that National Popular Vote violates any rule that has been applied to Presidential elections (“one person, one vote” is a districting rule, which doesn't really apply to elections per se, and arrangements which do not treat all voters in the state equally—such as the 2 for the statewide winner plus one for the winner of each CD method of assigning electors, which more heavily weights votes in Congressional districts with lower turnout in assigning state electors—survive under current law, and NPV doesn't even have that flaw.)

What the supreme court has said, is that if any decision is delegated to a vote, then that vote must meet constitutional muster.

Using votes cast in another state to determine the results of what is a state election likely violates rights of voters within that state.

And those rights are not wholely the legislature's to delegate away.

It's essentially extrajudicial gerrymandering.

Separately, and coming from another angle- it likely violates the constitution's guarantee of a republican form of government.

Anything any government in the US does must meet Constitutional muster. I'd like you to cite the specific decision you think indicates that a decision to assign electors based on the national popular vote would not meet such muster.

> Using votes cast in another state to determine the results of what is a state election likely violates rights of voters within that state.

Based on...what? I mean, except that it has survived so far, I can see an argument to the bare Constitution that giving unequal voting power to different voters within the state, which the two to the statewide winner plus one to the winner in each Congressional district method clearly does, violates the 14th Amendment Equal Protection rights of the voters so disadvantaged. But I don't even see a Constitutional argument, much less actual voting rights precedent, that negatively impacts on NPV.

> It's essentially extrajudicial gerrymandering.

Gerrymandering is drawing legislative districts, which is normally “extrajudicial” (since federal districting is expressly a power of state legislatures, and state-level districting is usually also a power of the state legislature, not the judiciary.) And gerrymandering is often legal and in many cases not even subject to federal review. Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. ___ (2019).

So saying it's “extradjudicial gerrymandering” is all of false, adding meaningless qualifiers to make it sound significant, and not supporting your argument that it is unconstitutional.

> Separately, and coming from another angle- it likely violates the constitution's guarantee of a republican form of government.

How? Based on what argument and applicable precedent?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/09/10/winner-tak...

Neither that per-district system, nor my original popular vote proportional system, would require a parliamentary style of government. Indeed, under a parliamentary system, the executive would be chosen by parliament itself and there would be no need for the electoral college or even the presidential vote at all.

Not the people.

(Hopefully that's a less controversial statement than Romney's famous line).

No, what is broken is indirect election with voting power distributed by state (no matter how you allocate the electoral votes based on the popular vote in the state, whether its winner-take-all, by-congressional-district with winner-take-the-extra-two, or proportional allocation), since the basic model, irrespective of allocation, creates a intense systemic incentive for voter disenfranchisement within states, since by disenfranchising people in your state that aren't likely to vote like you, you not only nullify their vote (but reduce your states overall vote) as you would with direct election, but seize their voting power for yourself (well, at least, redistribute it among those you do not disenfranchise within your state.)

This is, of course, the intended effect of the EC and 3/5 compromise, with the original focal disenfranchisement being chattel slavery. But it works even more powerfully without chattel slavery, because then you don't have the voting power from the disenfranchised population deweighted the way the 3/5 compromise did.

Distributing electors by state wasn’t the “intended effect” of the EC. Nobody proposed direct election of the President. The choices were between having Congress elect the President, and having a separate Electoral College. It arises out of the fact that the framers viewed us as a collection of separate states and so it made sense to do everything at the granularity of the state. The executive branch of the European Union is indirectly selected for the same reason.

As to the intended effect of the 3/5 compromise—what would have produced the result that some people want is for slaveholding Virginia to have won that debate, because it was the one that wanted proportional representation in both houses.

They're all ways of making a decision. In the end the votes are tallied somehow, to some goal. We used to have different goals 100 years ago.