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My colleague Trent England recently explained how, if the National Popular Vote interstate compact (NPV) were in effect, California could nullify the popular vote totals of small states simply by allowing 15-, 16-, and 17-year olds to vote. With roughly 1.5 million teenagers in that cohort, even if only half of them voted they would outvote each of nine states (Montana, for example, cast just over 600,000 votes in 2020). This would obviously give California more power to pick the president compared to those states that kept eighteen as the voting age.

But that isn’t the only way a state could use children to juice its vote totals and grab more power under NPV. In fact, the current Republican nominee for vice president, JD Vance, has proposed letting parents cast votes on behalf of their children, which would give even more power to any state that wanted to play an outsized role in picking the president (though his proposal was not connected to NPV).

Vance isn’t the only one offering this idea, known as Demeny Voting. Two respected law professors have a recent paper in the Notre Dame Law Review advocating for it, and I know it’s something being discussed in the election policy community.

A state that gave parents the right to cast votes on behalf of their minor children would immediately increase its power in the presidential election process. Consider Utah, with around a million children age 17 and under living with parents or guardians. That’s a lot of new votes to add into the national count. And because older adults typically vote at much higher rates than younger voters, it might even be possible that a small state like Utah giving parents the right to vote for their minor children would largely offset the effect of California allowing everyone fifteen and older to vote.

And of course, given the partisan makeup of each state, it seems fair to assume that those new votes in California are going to lean one way while the new votes in Utah go the other way.

None of this seems terribly advisable, not if done purely for political reasons in a tit-for-tat partisan battle. Unfortunately this is what NPV would lead to—a handful of states at first, followed by many others, all frantically scheming and maneuvering to expand their electorate in ways that might not be wise but that either give them more power or that attempt to claw back power taken from them. 

It reminds me of comments made a few years ago by Yale Law Professor Akhil Amar, one of the people who initially developed the idea of NPV:

…California could say: “Now that we have the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and we’re going to look at the national popular vote, we’re going to let seventeen-year-olds vote.” Texas might then say: “Ah, that’s very interesting, now California is going to play a little bigger role because more Californians can vote, so we’re going to let sixteen-year-olds vote.” Then Arkansas comes along and says: “Well, actually, we’re going to let dogs vote.”

As Trent said in the earlier post, a race to the bottom.