On April 13, 2026, Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) signed a law formally entering Virginia into the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, bringing it within striking distance of coming into effect and ensuring that presidents are directly selected by Americans, not the Electoral College. This would be the most consequential structural reform in a generation. Once states with at least 270 electoral votes sign on, signatory states would allocate their electoral votes to the winner of the presidential national popular vote. For the first time, every American’s vote for president would count equally, no matter where they live.
Virginia’s 13 electoral votes bring the compact’s total to 222, more than 80 percent of the way to the 270-vote threshold. That leaves just 48 electoral votes to go until every vote—urban and rural, red state and blue state—counts the same. Those 48 votes can be seen in states whose leadership will be decided in this November’s elections.
Arizona and Michigan together hold a combined 26 electoral votes, and both have already seen one legislative chamber pass the compact. Their passage of the compact would close more than half the remaining gap. From there, Pennsylvania could add another 19 electoral votes, North Carolina offers 16, and Wisconsin and Minnesota each offer 10. This does not have to be a 20-year horizon, but rather something that could be accomplished within the next year.
The importance of moving to a popular vote for president
The case for a national popular vote for electing the president is simple: No American’s vote should count more than another’s. In an era when the administration of our elections has become a target for brazen disinformation campaigns and legal warfare to undermine their results, the case has grown sharper—and far more urgent.
Consider how the Electoral College means that small margins in a handful of states often decide the outcome of a presidential election, inviting attacks on the election systems of those few states. In 2024, Wisconsin was decided by 29,397 votes, Michigan by 80,103, and Pennsylvania by 120,266. A combined margin of roughly 230,000 votes across three states determined the outcome of a contest in which more than 150 million Americans cast ballots. In 2020, the elections in Arizona and Georgia were even closer, with margins of fewer than 11,000 votes and 12,000 votes, respectively. When the presidency turns on margins that narrow in the same predictable cluster of states, every election administrator, canvassing board, and county courthouse in those states becomes a high-value and vulnerable pressure point for interference.
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact creates a key structural defense of American elections by making the battleground the size of the American electorate itself.
Those pressure points have been exploited—relentlessly. In 2020, the Trump campaign sued Wisconsin to throw out 22,000 ballots from its two most Democratic counties, an amount that could have erased Joe Biden’s entire margin of victory in the state. In the 2024 cycle, there were more than 130 election-related lawsuits filed between August and November, with many concentrated in battleground states. Since 2020, more than 30 county officials across eight battleground and swing states—Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Michigan—have voted to delay or refuse certification of election results, actions courts have repeatedly ruled unlawful but that nonetheless succeed in injecting doubt and delay into the system. After the 2020 election, Georgia election workers were driven from their jobs by a disinformation campaign that a federal jury later found had defamed them, resulting in a $148 million verdict.
A national popular vote can be a release valve, as the margins would likely be in the millions. President Trump won the 2024 popular vote by roughly 2.3 million votes; Biden won in 2020 by about 7 million votes. No concentrated litigation blitz, intimidation of county canvassers, or manufactured fraud narrative in Fulton County or Bucks County moves a national margin of that size. Simply put, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact creates a key structural defense of American elections by making the battleground the size of the American electorate itself.
Unlocking participation increases legitimacy
The current system does not just distort campaigns; it suppresses them. Estimates suggest that in the 2012 presidential race, turnout was raised by 7 to 8 percentage points in states that were highly targeted by the campaigns. Political scientists studying “battleground” versus “blackout” states have documented that “living on contested electoral terrain does have a positive impact on the political interest and engagement levels of lower income voters”—voters who our political system already fails in countless other ways.
The current Electoral College system is not neutral; it substantially boosts the value of a vote to Americans who happen to live in the right battleground state and weakens the value of a vote from everyone else. If a president were to be selected by the national popular vote, candidates would have to compete for votes everywhere—suburban Dallas, rural Oregon, urban Birmingham—because every one of those votes would count.
When the electoral map resembles a patchwork of regional grievances, the winner inherits a contested mandate before the first day of their term.
Stanford historian Jack Rakove has argued that the Electoral College itself corrodes the authority of modern presidents. When Americans view the country through the lens of entrenched partisan geography, Rakove observes, they “form a disparaging view of the victor’s presidential authority right from the outset.” When the electoral map resembles a patchwork of regional grievances, the winner inherits a contested mandate before the first day of their term. A presidency earned by winning the most American votes overall is harder to delegitimize, and it is more likely to produce the kind of cross-regional coalition-building that the current system actively discourages.
Current battleground states have a reasonable concern about losing their outsized influence, but that influence can be fleeting. Colorado and Ohio have moved off the battleground map in recent cycles; Georgia and Arizona have moved onto it. Today’s swing state is tomorrow’s afterthought. A national popular vote offers every state a permanent stake in presidential campaigns, year in and year out.
Conclusion
Virginia joined the compact through an ordinary democratic process, under normal political conditions, with no constitutional crisis required. With only 48 electoral votes left to go, a simple act by a handful of states could address a looming weakness of our democratic system and ensure that the promise of “one person, one vote” is fulfilled.