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Comment by stbenjam | Hacker News Reader

It won't ever happen -- "On February 17, 2021, the North Dakota Senate passed SB 2271,[153] "to amend and reenact sections ... relating to procedures for canvassing and counting votes for presidential electors"[154] in a deliberate—albeit indirect—effort to stymie the efficacy of the NPVIC by prohibiting disclosure of the state's popular vote until after the Electoral College meets."

That didn't end up becoming law, but there will be a critical mass of states opposed to effort (swing states who will lose influence mostly) that will pass things like this making the NPVIC impossible to implement.

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The compact addresses that -- states that aren't part of the compact and don't produce vote counts just won't be counted. It won't matter because the compact states would have enough EC votes to ignore those other states.

"We've solved democracy! ... by disenfranchising a whole new set of voters."

I think the point is that the EC already disenfranchises a whole bunch of voters, and maybe if this passes and the red states get totally cut out, they might come around to passing an actual popular vote ammendment.

Most people should already know this, but I'll say it anyway. The EC exists to provide some balance between the most populous states and the least. Switching to a pure popular vote destroys that balance and brings us closer to a "tyranny of the majority."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

Instead we have an inability to act due to minority propaganda.

I'm not sure enabling the minority to completely lock up the machinery of governance is a preferable alternative.

The US constitution is all about protecting small groups from big groups. It’s a feature not a bug.

If you want to comfortably win elections you just have to win by more than a percent or two.

The constitution is not a suicide pact

The EC was created to protect slave states, not small states. It just so happened that those states had smaller populations because they only counted slaves as 3/5 of a person.

And furthermore, because the House is capped at 435, it throws everything off. If we kept following the original algorithm outlined in the constitution, which was very similar to the square root rule, the house would have 1600 members and the EC would still match the popular vote every time.

This is all broken because of the artificial cap on the house that makes each member represent far too many people.

"Slave states" and "Free states" did not exist at the time of the constitution's ratification - slavery was legal and practiced in all 13 of them. And while south Carolina and Georgia were amongst the bottom half of the stack population wise, they weren't significantly smaller than the other small states. The EC was Explicitly laid out in the federalist papers (68 to be specific) to exist for the purpose of protecting the smaller states from those like Massachusetts and Virginia.

The EC doesn’t provide balance. It provides a layer of indirection which can be used to game elections. And all of the EC delegates are political hacks, not honest brokers with the country’s best interests at the center of their duties. The “tyranny of the majority” talk about elections is just FUD — direct elections of representatives make the government more responsive to the desires of voters.

The EC is a fossil from a time when representatives didn’t trust the average person to vote, but they sure as hell wanted the benefit of the average person in their state counting towards their census tally.

Your view, while an accurate representation of the original result of the negotiations of the Founding Fathers, disenfranchises more Republicans in California than there are Republicans in any other state.

State lines were mostly arbitrarily chosen and should not matter when choosing the leader who represents all of the states. For the same reason we use the popular vote of the entire jurisdiction to choose the elected officials for Senate and House, the NPVIC is a good compromise to improve the responsiveness of the government to the voters.

The US is a federation of states, ultimately. They have a right to form treaties among themselves. The same conceptual backing that gives all states representation via US Senators gives them the backing to do this. I'm all for more federalism, and I'm fine with the Senator system and the Electoral College.

I don't think this stops it. The NPVIC seems to have accounted for this.

It is discussed here: https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/bill-text

    "Popular votes can, however, only be counted from non-member states if there are popular votes available to count. As previously mentioned, Article II of the compact guarantees that each member state will produce a popular vote count because it requires member states to permit their voters to vote for President and Vice President in a “statewide popular election.” Even though all states have permitted their voters to vote for presidential electors in a “statewide popular election” since the 1880 election, non-member states are, of course, not bound by the compact. In the unlikely event that a non-member state were to take the presidential vote away from its own people, there would be no popular vote count available from such a state.

    Similarly, in the unlikely event that a non-member state were to remove the names of the presidential nominees and vice-presidential nominees from the ballot and present the voters only with names of candidates for presidential elector (as was the case in 1960 in Alabama as shown by the ballot in figure 2.13 and discussed in section 2.11), there would be no way to associate the vote counts of the various presidential electors with the nationwide tally being accumulated by any regular “presidential slate” running in the rest of the country.

    The compact addresses the above two unlikely possibilities by specifying that the popular votes that are to be aggregated to produce the “national popular vote total” are those that are

    “… cast for each presidential slate in each State of the United States and in the District of Columbia in which votes have been cast in a statewide popular election … .”

    In this way, the first clause of Article III of the compact deals with the unlikely possibility of a “one-state veto” preventing the orderly operation of the compact."

I guess the bill maybe does get around this by still having a popular vote, but not reporting the results of it. However, as far as I can tell, the NPVIC doesn't specify how the "chief election officials" are to determine the popular votes in each state, so maybe they could go off of other data, like exit polls.

Even if it does stop it, the end result is a catch-22. I don't think a president could then be elected, at least by normal means.

I don't think I'd want to have a system using exit polls... they've been wrong before. Once you're using polls why have elections at all?

Anyway, my point is states opposed to the NPVIC already have at least one good idea to stymie it. I think they could come up with plenty more. What if states refuse to certify their own votes until a majority of states vote to force a result equivalent to the "old" system?

>It won't ever happen

People said the same thing about Roe vs. Wade being repealed.

Never say never.

An interesting twist on the “swing states are against the NPVIC” narrative is currently playing out in Nevada. My read of this narrative goes as follows: swing states, including Nevada, will find their importance in Presidential elections diminished, and therefore their influence and ability to garner patronage diminished, if the NPVIC comes into effect and survives legal challenges and so on.

Persuaded by this narrative (I presume), then-Governor of Nevada Steve Sisolak vetoed the NPVIC bill back in May of 2019 after it had passed both houses of the Nevada legislature.

Now, five years later, after passing through the legislature a second time, accession to the NPVIC via an amendment to the state constitution of Nevada will be a ballot question in November 2026 for voters — if it passes again in the 2025-2026 legislative session for a third time. [0]

0. https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/state/nv

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