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Bipartisan opposition has stopped the National Popular Vote interstate compact (NPV) in Virginia during recent years, but it is back in the 2026 General Assembly. Thankfully, bipartisan opposition remains strong, as shown by a Richmond Times-Dispatch article last week. Jasper Hendricks, a prominent Democrat and former presidential elector, explains why the NPV compact is short sighted and dangerous.

In 2016, I represented Virginia as one of the commonwealth’s presidential electors, casting my ballot for Hillary Clinton. Did I like the election outcome? No, not at all. But as a Democrat who grew up in rural America, I still see the value in the constitutional compromise that shaped how we elect the president. The Electoral College exists not just to balance population size, but to preserve the voice of states in the federal process. Under NPVIC, smaller or rural states would be made politically irrelevant. Campaigns would focus only on the biggest metropolitan areas, creating a new class of ignored Americans.

The author points out NPV lobbyists shady tactics, telling both Republicans and Democrats that the compact will help them win future elections. In fact, NPV would destabilize politics and allow small-plurality winners, making outcomes unpredictable and less democratic. He notes that the compact relies on electors breaking faith with state voters.

The National Popular Vote interstate compact is not a constitutional amendment. It is a legislative workaround crafted in backrooms and sold to the public as progress. It depends on states agreeing to ignore their own voters if the national tally favors a different candidate. To me, that looks more like disenfranchisement than fairness.

As our own experts have pointed out, the NPV compact may not be designed to work. The lawyers who came up with the concept have distanced themselves from the compact itself. It certainly creates a problem when states like Maine use ranked-choice voting and is oddly silent on close elections, recounts, and disputes. Hopefully Virginia legislators, on both sides of the aisle, will see these many flaws and continue to oppose NPV.