A national effort to circumvent the Electoral College has gained another state.

Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed a bill Monday that adds the state to the National Popular Vote Compact, an agreement among states to award their presidential electoral votes to the nationwide popular vote winner.

With Virginia, the total number of states signed on to the interstate compact is now 18, plus the District of Columbia, for a total of 222 electoral votes.

The compact doesn’t go into effect, though, until there are enough states signed up to reach the required 270 electoral votes to elect a president.

  • DomeGuy@lemmy.world
    1·
    9 hours ago

    Unless you are just unfamiliar with the idea that the United States federal government was intended to be an experimental hybrid between [state] and federal interests.

    The antecedents of the American legal system are nations and empires with a complex web of local and sovereign interests, going back at least to the Magna Carta and the immediate pre-indepndence relationship of the colonies with the British Parliament.

    When the current US Constitution was written I suspect the more pressing interests were “not being abused by Europe” and “avoiding wars between the states over currency or slaves” rather than any high-minded experiment with federal democracy.

    Anyway…

    if we uncapped the house it would take some of that undo power away from the smaller states and states in general.

    You’re making a correlation I just don’t see. Either direct election of the executive or dramatically increasing the membership in the house would make definitely make the federal government more equitably responsive to larger states. But I don’t see how this at all this would affects the balance of power between the state and federal governments.

    The vertical separation of power between the federal government and the fifty sovereign states is not directly affected by how the federal government is chosen. One nationwide election, fifty statewide elections (plus DC), or just a vote by the governors or congress or teh various state legislators would all result in the same enumerated and interpreted power.