Popular Vote Threatens Geography’s Voting Rights
Democrats have moved the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact closer to its 270-vote trigger, endangering America’s carefully managed tradition of allowing a handful of counties to select a president for everyone else. The agreement would award participating states’ electoral votes to the candidate who receives the most votes nationwide, replacing the Electoral College’s elegant patchwork of battleground diners, regional grudges and television markets with the reckless principle that ballots should be counted equally.
President Donald Trump condemned the plan as an attack on the nation’s least populated acreage. “They want to count every person one time, exactly one time, which is horribly unfair because Wyoming has tremendous land, beautiful land, and California already has too many people getting counted,” Trump said. Under the compact’s extremist arithmetic, a voter in Los Angeles would have the same political value as a voter in Cheyenne, despite Cheyenne’s decisive advantage in cowboy credibility. Cornfields, cattle ranches and several strategically vital empty lots could lose the indirect influence they have accumulated through generations of not being people.
Supporters argue the compact would encourage presidential campaigns to seek votes across all 50 states instead of repeatedly visiting the same Wisconsin diner and pretending to enjoy pie. Opponents warn that candidates might begin campaigning in states they cannot currently locate on an electoral map, forcing consultants to develop messages for millions of Americans who have gone decades without seeing a motorcade. The plan would also impose on presidential elections the same destabilizing system already used to choose governors, senators, mayors and elementary-school treasurers: whoever gets the most votes wins. Constitutional objections are expected from defenders of the Founders’ original vision of a modern two-party contest decided by cable advertising in six states the Founders could not have named. The acreage gap is therefore the nation’s most urgent voting-rights crisis.
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