Virginia has joined the National Popular Vote Compact, an agreement between states that their electoral votes will not necessarily go to the candidate that earned them on the state's ballot, but to the presidential candidate that wins the national popular vote.
The Compact currently lacks the required number of pledged electoral votes to take effect.
According to Fox News, Spanberger signed the bill to the outrage of Virginia Republicans, saying that the bill will make the state’s votes “null and void.”
Abraham Hamilton III tells Today's Issues crew on AFR that given the right circumstances, it could steal the White House from the actual winner.
“Virginia has signed on to the National Popular Vote Compact, which says that if we ever get enough states that represent 270 Electoral College votes, then this could kick in. And basically, it's an end-around for the Constitution,” Hamilton says.
Currently, 22 states and the District of Columbia have signed on to the Compact, representing 222 electoral votes.
The Compact includes a conditional trigger provision that says it remains dormant until enough states sign on that can guarantee an Electoral College victory for the national popular vote winner.
While the member states pass the legislation individually, the Compact only activates when the total electoral weight of all participating states reaches a majority of the Electoral College, i.e. at least 270 Electoral Votes.
As it stands, the NPV compact sits at 222 electoral votes.
The scheme was dreamed up after the confusion of the 2000 election when George Bush won the White House despite not winning the popular vote.
Hamilton says the scheme is weighted to the larger states.
“Because states like California, New York, Florida, etc. are so heavily populated, then you could win the national popular vote without winning a cross-section of voters across the entirety of the United States, which is the exact purpose for which the Electoral College was created,” Hamilton states.
The framers created the electoral vote, he explains, so less populated areas of the country would be represented in the White House. If the presidency was decided by the popular vote, candidates would only have to campaign in and win the votes of cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago – all Democrat strongholds.
“It was intentionally created that way to require whoever would be the commander-in-chief and would be the chief executive officer for our federal government, that they had to have representative support across the entirety of the country, as opposed to just being able to win in dense population centers,” Hamilton states.
For now, there is no organized effort to challenge the National Vote Compact. There have been efforts in some state legislatures — Maine and Connecticut — to remove themselves from the Compact, but those efforts eventually failed.
