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In a recent column for the Washington Examiner, I lay out many concerns about the National Popular Vote interstate compact (NPV). One of the most serious is also the reason why no major nation uses the compact’s election system.

NPV attempts to create a one-step, winner-takes-all election for president and vice president. While most major democracies use parliamentary systems, where voters never have a vote to choose the prime minister (and certainly not for their monarch), a few do hold direct elections for a national executive. Yet none use a one-step system, for the obvious reason that it could be won by a candidate with very small plurality support.

This problem gets worse as nations grow larger and more diverse. This is why the only nations to use the NPV system are tiny, like El Salvador, Cameroon, and Equatorial Guinea. As I wrote for the Washington Examiner:

A national popular vote could allow a candidate to win without a national coalition. The simplest form of a popular vote — a one-step, plurality election — would encourage more candidates to run, including those with only regional support, in hopes of winning a splintered election with perhaps just 25% or less of the vote. Because of this, no major modern democracy uses this process at the national level.

In the piece, I also described how we got the Electoral College and its importance.

The American Founders considered and rejected a direct national election because those in small states worried about being ignored. It was clear even in 1787, when the Constitution was written, that big states and big cities would have massive power in a national popular vote. The Founders believed in checks and balances, and they crafted a presidential election process to uphold those principles.

The Constitution, in Article II and the Twelfth Amendment, creates a two-step election process for president and vice president. Each state gets a number of presidential electors equal to its representation in Congress (two senators plus its number of representatives). Each state’s legislature determines how to choose those electors. At the beginning, some legislatures chose electors themselves, but very quickly, states began to hold elections.

Today, every state elects its presidential electors. While most states elect them all statewide, in Maine and Nebraska they elect one in each congressional district and the remaining two statewide. Presidential electors then cast their state’s electoral votes for president and vice president.

This two-step system checks the power of the biggest states and cities, which creates a balance of power. To win the White House, candidates must win many states, which takes a massive national coalition just to have a chance.

Even when President Bill Clinton won in 1992 with just 43% of the popular vote, he still won 32 states, including liberal strongholds like Massachusetts and California, but also conservative-leaning states like Georgia, Louisiana, and Montana. And when President Donald Trump won in 2016 with nearly 46% of the popular vote, he did it by smashing through the Democrats’ so-called “blue wall” and winning 30 states.

The very least Americans should expect from NPV advocates is an answer to this concern. Do they believe that building national coalitions is unimportant? If they think small plurality winners will not happen under their unusual system, why not? Upending the time-tested presidential election process would change the American political ecosystem. While not all of the unintended consequences can be know, some are obvious and deserve an answer.