National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement joined by several U.S. states and the District of Columbia to circumvent the Electoral College by ensuring that the winner of the Electoral College vote, who then becomes the president of the United States, is also the winner of the national popular vote. Under the interstate compact, which has yet to take effect, each member state and the District of Columbia will award all of its electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, regardless of how that candidate fares among its own voters. The interstate compact will thus prevent a candidate who has lost the national popular vote from becoming president of the United States. (That outcome that has occurred four times—most recently in 2016 when Republican Donald Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton by an Electoral College vote of 304 to 227, despite losing the national popular vote by more than 2.8 million; and in 2000 when Republican George W. Bush defeated Democrat Al Gore by an Electoral College vote of 271 to 266, despite losing the national popular vote by more than 500,000.) The interstate compact will take effect when the participating states and the District of Columbia have collectively accumulated at least 270 electoral votes, which is the minimum number needed to win an election in the Electoral College. As of May 2024 17 states and the District of Columbia, with a total of 209 electoral votes, have joined the interstate compact, starting with Maryland in 2007. At the time they joined the compact, all but one of its members had a single-party government in which both the executive and legislative branches were controlled by the Democratic Party.
The Electoral College system makes it possible for the loser of the national popular vote to win the presidential election because nearly all states award all of their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote of their residents. Presidential candidates can thus acquire numerous electoral votes with only small popular-vote majorities in less populous states.
The campaign to promote the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact was launched in 2006 with the founding of the nonprofit organization National Popular Vote by John R. Koza, a computer scientist and coinventor of the scratch-off lottery ticket, and Barry Fadem, an attorney specializing in election law. Their initiative followed decades of failed attempts to abolish the Electoral College via a constitutional amendment. Koza argued that, in addition to ensuring that the winner of the popular vote is elected, the interstate compact would force presidential candidates to campaign throughout the country, not just in the few “battleground” states where popular support for Republican and Democratic presidential candidates tends to be nearly equal.
The National Popular Vote claims on its website that “under the current system, a small number of votes in a small number of states regularly decides the Presidency.” Accordingly, “presidential candidates only pay attention to voters in closely divided battleground states,” while voters in “politically irrelevant spectator states” are ignored. Furthermore, the winner-take-all electoral system in most states “fuel[s] doubt, controversy over real or imagined irregularities, hair-splitting post-election litigation, and unrest.” The National Popular Vote argues that, under the interstate compact, all voters will be relevant, regardless of where they live.
Some political scholars and journalists have expressed doubts about the viability of the interstate compact. In 2023, for example, Washington Post columnist Jason Willick argued that the compact would lead to a host of problems, including those that would result if a state were to award its electoral votes to a candidate who did not win the popular vote of its residents. “That extraordinary demand would raise incentives for subversion,” he wrote, adding:
Would swing-state Democratic governors certify a Republican presidential candidate as the winner of their state’s electoral votes if most voters in their states voted for the Democratic candidate? The governors could claim a prerogative to ignore the compact under federal or state constitutional provisions.
Other legal experts have agreed that the compact is sure to invite legal challenges. Willick also suggested that the compact would increase the likelihood that multiple viable candidates would run because they would need only a plurality of the popular vote to win 270 electoral votes. “Larger candidate fields would lower presidential vote shares and weaken presidential mandates,” he wrote.