This article first appeared in Complete Colorado.
In 2020, Colorado’s leftist state legislature signed onto the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPV). A recent news item—from Panama of all places—shows that NPV, like most other “progressive” causes, is more about Third World-style jungle politics than about popular government.
NPV seeks to nullify the U.S. Constitution’s presidential election procedure. As I have detailed elsewhere, that procedure consists of three steps:
First, the people of each state choose their state’s presidential electors.
Second, the presidential electors (known collectively as the “Electoral College”) choose the president and vice president.
Third, if no candidate receives a majority in the Electoral College, the House of Representatives holds a runoff election for president and the Senate holds one for vice president.
This procedure has served America extraordinarily well. It ensures the winning candidate enjoys truly national support. And contrary to “progressive” disinformation, its creation had nothing to do with slavery.
The Constitution’s presidential election system has never failed to award the presidency to a candidate winning a majority of the popular vote. However, on rare occasions, it has denied victory to a candidate receiving only a narrow plurality. Generally this has happened when the plurality candidate’s votes were concentrated in only a few sections of the country.
NPV seeks to demolish our well-tested presidential election system. Under NPV, each state joining the compact would deliver its presidential electors to whomever wins (or is reported as winning) a bare national plurality. What the state’s voters want would be irrelevant. If Coloradans voted for Candidate X but Candidate Y received (or was reported as receiving) a bare nationwide plurality, then all Colorado’s presidential electors would have to vote for Candidate Y.
The compact would come into effect when states holding 270 electoral votes (a majority of the Electoral College) signed on.
The NPV compact suffers from many practical and constitutional problems. I outlined some of them in a previous article. The compact would encourage divisive regionalism. It probably violates both the U.S. and the Colorado Constitutions. In calculating who won the national vote, state election officials would have no way to verify the reported results from other states. NPV would encourage multi-candidate elections with a proliferation of fringe candidates, each hoping to scrape out a bare plurality. And the system could award victory to a candidate rejected by the overwhelming majority of voters.
Not surprisingly, all developed nations—even those with some sort of direct election for their chief executive—have rejected NPV’s pure “plurality wins” system. NPV is law only in a handful of Third World nations. They are Venezuela, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Honduras, Paraguay, Mexico, and Panama.
The Recent Panama Election
Panama’s May 5 presidential election illustrates how NPV encourages multi-candidate elections and awards victory to a candidate most voters don’t want.
There were six leading candidates in Panama. Here are the election results:
José Raúl Mulino…………………………………………………………………. 34.23%
Ricardo Lombana…………………………………………………………………. 24.59%
Martin Torrijos……………………………………………………………………. 16.03%
Rómulo Roux……………………………………………………………………….. 11.38%
Zulay Rodríguez…………………………………………………………………….. 6.61%
José Gabriel Carrizo……………………………………………………………….. 5.88%
Other…………………………………………………………………………………… 1.28%
Total……………………………………………………………………………….. 100.00%
Because José Raúl Mulino won a bare plurality, he was “elected.” Even though nearly two-thirds of Panamanians voted against him!
As I have documented previously, results like these are common in NPV countries. The last three elections in Honduras provide a further illustration. Although the winner of the 2021 election received a narrow majority, more often the “winner” is someone most voters don’t want. In 2017, Honduras elected a president with only only 42% of the ballots, and in 2013 only 37 percent.
Under the Third World NPV scheme, it’s often worse: In 1992, Fidel Ramos “won” the presidency of the Philippines with only 23%.
As if that’s not enough, the electoral maps of most of these elections show sharp regional splits, with both winning and losing candidates prevailing in compact areas. This is a classic prescription for regional strife and even civil war.
NPV was a crackpot idea that became favored by the left only after Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016. He did so by garnering 46 percent from all over the country, as opposed to Hillary Clinton’s 48 percent concentrated in a few sections.
The irony is that compared with many NPV elections, Trump’s 46% looks like a landslide. Under NPV, candidates often win with much less than that.
The Colorado legislature’s approval of NPV—like its notorious “bag law” and the JeffCo Silverii payoff—is just more Third-World jungle politics. And it illustrates once again that when leftists refer to “our democracy,” what they really mean is their own oligarchy.
