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Colorado was one of five blue states to rush into the National Popular Vote interstate compact after Donald Trump win the 2016 election. That bill passed the legislature on a partisan basis—only Democrats voted yes, while seven Democrats and all Republicans voted no. It then narrowly survived a citizen referendum. Yet the debate and campaign rarely addressed an essential question: Would the compact actually work, or would it bring about a constitutional catastrophe? 

This is a good reason for the Colorado Legislature to reconsider NPV. And they will, at a hearing next week on House Bill 1102. 

Of course, a few developments since 2019 may also have caught the attention of legislators. In the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections, each winner also received the most popular votes. One was a Democrat, the other a Republican. And had NPV been in effect in 2024, Colorado would have been represented by Republican electors who would have cast all the states electoral votes for Donald Trump and J.D. Vance—despite the fact that Colorado voters favored Kamala Harris and Tim Walz by nearly 11 percent.

Yet the real reason to reject NPV and ensure it never takes effect is not merely political, but constitutional in the deepest sense. Ours is a nation constituted as states that are, in many respects, coequal. Our presidential election process is one of checks and balances, where the power of even the largest states has a limit that in turn creates a balance of power among the states—and their voters. Each state has a distinct voice and the election plays out in two steps.

This creates incentives: political parties need vast, national coalitions just to have a chance to win the presidency. Campaigns must build on that foundation. And any election problem is contained within an individual state (I often compare the Electoral College’s use of states to the water-tight compartments on an ocean liner: a leak in one spot is contained and thus can’t sink the whole ship). 

The NPV compact, on the other hand, tries to rip up state lines—but can’t really do that, so it overlays one election process on another. It puts all the power in the hands of the “chief election official” in each NPV compact state. Each one will determine national results, but only for his or her own state, by gathering results from other states. This power, in practice, must include what counts as an “official” result, what to do if a state isn’t done counting or recounting by the deadline, and what to do about results that might be somehow illegitimate. 

What does the NPV compact say about all this? Nothing: Nothing about recounts; nothing about contested elections; nothing about states or officials refusing to cooperate. At best, it’s all left to state and federal judges. Is that what Colorado legislators want—future election rules, or results, decided by the courts?

I recently examined more flaws in NPV and have also dissected the fascinating conflict between NPV and RCV. Hopefully Colorado legislators will dig deeper into the details of the compact and see the risks associated with this too-clever-by-half scheme.