The House of Delegates voted to have the Old Dominion join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement that would force Virginia’s 13 electors to vote for the candidate chosen by the national popular vote.
Joining this compact would have nullified Virginia’s voice in this most important of all elections, enabled the tyranny of the majority, and upended a system that has worked well for 233 years.
This is an argument I’ve seen elsewhere; particularly the “nullify” part of it. As I see it, it’s just seizing on the more eyebrow-raising part of the NPVIC–the idea that a state’s Electoral Votes will sometimes be given to a candidate who didn’t win that state’s popular vote–and presenting it as though it were a new idea.
The word “nullified” makes it sound as though Virginia’s voters would be deprived of their chance to participate in the election. In fact, if this situation were to arise, it would simply mean that the majority of Virginia’s voters would have lost the election, something that has happened any number of times.
In fact, a popular vote would achieve the reverse of what the author fears. Let’s say that the Compact passes, with states totaling 270 Electoral Votes signing on, but Virginia holds out and doesn’t sign on.
In the next election, the winning strategy changes: instead of looking at states as blocks and assuming that California will vote Democratic and Texas will vote Republican, candidates will have to appeal to broad swaths of people: suddenly the Republicans in California and the Democrats in Texas are worth reaching out to. And so are the voters in Virginia, be they Democrat, Republican, third-party, or independent. Unlike the present system, every one of those votes will move the dial a little bit to the left or to the right.
So far from nullifying anyone’s vote, the popular vote would make everyone’s vote count.