Electoral College coming to an end? Blue wave gives Democrats’ decades-old scheme new life

Some Democratic states have long planned to override the Electoral College in favor of a popular vote, and these fantasies are closer to coming to fruition than ever before.In fact, some are eyeing 2028 as the earliest window to implement the plan that could change the way the United States elects its presidents.The deadline to join the compact for 2028 is July 20, 2028.They call the plan the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, and analysts have found a feasible path to activating it by the next presidential election.The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is an agreement between a growing number of states that "guarantees the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and the District of Columbia)," according to the National Center for Interstate Compacts. The basic idea behind the compact isn’t to legally remove the Electoral College from the Constitution, advocates say. Rather, the Electoral College would essentially be rendered moot when the number of states’ electors equals 270 or more.Currently, 18 states — California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Virginia, Vermont, and Washington — and the District of Columbia have enacted the compact, according to National Popular Vote.The states' electors add up to a total of 222, meaning the state equivalent of 48 electors would have to join the compact prior to election season in order to activate the agreement. RELATED: 'This is how you rig elections’: Stephen Miller’s wife slams Wikipedia for scrubbing Abdul El-Sayed's past The deadline to join the compact for 2028 is July 20, 2028. The National Popular Vote, which would undermine the Electoral College while leaving it intact, has been floated as an idea for several years, though it was not treated as a viable option because the number of states and electors never came close to 270. The blue wave that swept the nation last week, however, may bring the compact into more serious conversation going forward as it is widely believed that the National Popular Vote would benefit Democrats and harm Republicans at the ballot box.Multiple articles published in the months leading up to the midterms identified very similar paths to 270 votes, that is, five states that could realistically be on the verge of joining the compact.The identified pathway to 270 consists in having Arizona (11 electoral votes), Pennsylvania (19 votes), Michigan (15 votes), Nevada (6 votes), and Wisconsin (10 votes) join the compact. The elector vote total for all five states is 61, so Pennsylvania and Michigan plus two of the three other states would have to join to make it an option for the next presidential election.Previously, the problem with this path was that none of the states had a Democratic trifecta, the most favorable condition for getting the compact signed into law. For context, the 18 states in the compact are or were blue trifecta states when they joined.The midterms changed the landscape in these other five states dramatically. Nevada, the only state on the list with a Republican governor, flipped blue. All of the House and Senate chambers, which were generally a mix of blue and red before the midterms, flipped to the Democrats without exception. The result: All five states, which were previously mixed Republican and Democratic, are now Democrat trifectas.Democrat control, however, does not guarantee the successful passage of the law entering the state into the compact, and other large obstacles remain even if they do pass the laws. Trent England, a spokesman for Save Our States, told Blaze News that voters should be “very worried about this attempt to hijack the Electoral College.”England pointed out that many Democrats do not want to make this change, arguing that the importance of certain states, like Pennsylvania for example, would dramatically change for the worse for Democrats under the compact.The Save Our States spokesman also argued that the compact is “seriously flawed” for a number of procedural reasons, saying “It has no provisions for a nationwide recount, says nothing about how to combine votes from states using ranked-choice voting, and relies on cooperation from states not in the compact.”Concerns over congressional approval of agreements between states as well as individual voters' rights plague the initiative. As former federal prosecutor Andrew Cherkasky told Fox News, "Absent a constitutional amendment, the legal and practical barriers are insurmountable," noting that the results of a popular vote will likely have surprising and unintended effects that may essentially cancel out votes. It is believed that if enough states join the compact to officially activate the agreement, the case would quickly be elevated to the Supreme Court to determine if it is constitutional. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!