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Yesterday, a committee in the Colorado House of Representatives heard testimony on HB 1102, a bill to remove the state from the National Popular Vote interstate compact (NPV). The founder and executive director of Save Our States, Trent England, testified in favor of the bill. What follows is a summary of his remarks.

In the years since the Colorado Legislature passed NPV, there have been two presidential elections. The Democrats won the first, and received the most popular votes nationwide. In the second, just last year, the Republicans won and also received the most popular votes nationwide.

Those elections highlight a distinct and remarkable trend: over the last century, Republicans and Democrats have evenly split presidential contests. This has happened even as political maps have radically changed, and both parties have become more diverse. This dynamism happened as each major party constantly worked to build or maintain a coalition national enough to win the Electoral College.

This is an irony perhaps, but also an obvious feature of the Electoral College: our state-by-state election requires political parties to be more national, and thus more diverse. Both major parties are better for that system. Colorado voters, and Colorado as a state, are better off for that system—our constitutional, state-by-state presidential election process.

The creator of the NPV compact admitted that his is an attempt at an “end run” around the Constitution. Like many compact supporters, he concedes that his preference would be to amend the Constitution. But that’s hard, and so he developed this interstate compact, which attempts to overlay one election system on another.

It is mere common sense that overlaying one election system, with distinct values, upon another election system with different values, is a dangerous enterprise. 

It is also unfortunately distracting, leaving many people debating the Electoral College while missing the deep flaws in the compact itself. This was evident in debates in 2019 and 2020 in Colorado, where there was little attention about how the compact would work—or whether it would work at all.

NPV would give tremendous power to a handful of state election officials. They would be relied on to certify state-specific, national vote totals. The compact also relies on cooperation from all states—including states that have rejected it. The compact process would fail to achieve mathematically meaningful totals if some states used ranked-choice voting or other novel practices like approval voting or Demeny voting.

Finally, the compact says nothing about close or contested elections. It is simply silent. It has no provisions for recounts, even though it could—for the first time—necessitate a nationwide recount. The compact leaves all of these obvious questions to state and federal judges, guaranteeing that the courts would interfere in future presidential elections.

All of this irresponsibility is why even the three legal scholars credited with the idea behind NPV have warned that the compact is poorly drafted and could cause “constitutional crises.” Those professors dislike the Electoral College and would be glad to replace it, but even they can see that the NPV compact is deeply flawed and dangerous.