There's been news lately relating to the National Popular Vote (NPV) movement. This is the interstate compact that would ensure that the winner of a presidential election is the candidate receiving the most popular votes across the whole country. There is a misconception that the compact abolishes the electoral college. It would be more accurate to say that it involves individual states reforming the manner in which they distribute their electoral votes. The Constitution establishes the electoral college but is silent on the question of how the individual electors within the states should vote. There has rarely been uniformity among the states on this matter. Currently, 48 states give all their electoral votes to the statewide winner. The other two--Maine and Nebraska--award them by congressional district. So, for example, in the last presidential election there was a different result in Maine's two congressional districts--Trump carried one, Clinton carried the other, and Clinton won more votes statewide. Trump thus netted one electoral vote, for the district he carried, while Clinton added three, one for the district she won and two more for winning more votes across the whole state. In the first presidential election, only three of the states awarded their electoral votes according to the winner-take-all arrangement currently employed in 48 states.
Under the terms of NPV, states simply agree to amend, as they sometimes have in the past, how their electors will vote. Specifically, the states within the compact agree that they will award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, but only once the states within the compact possess at least 270 electoral votes, the minimum needed to win. You see that the electoral college isn't "abolished." The winner of a presidential election is still the candidate who wins at least 270 electoral votes. But, under the terms of the compact, the electoral college winner will necessarily be the winner of the national vote. It's not "illegal" or "unconstitutional"--states are simply exercising their authority to work out the details relating to their slate of electors.
The recent news is that three more states are poised to join the compact. Indeed one already has: Colorado. In Delaware and New Mexico, legislation to join the compact has now passed both houses of the state legislature and is headed to the governor's desk for signature. Both governors have indicated their support. Once the respective bills have been signed, the alphabetical roster of compact states, with the number of their electoral votes, will be as represented in the below table. Keep in mind that the compact takes effect when the electoral vote tally of its members reaches 270.
| STATE | EVs | EV TOTAL |
| California | 55 | 55 |
| Colorado | 9 | 64 |
| Connecticut | 7 | 71 |
| Delaware | 3 | 74 |
| D.C. | 3 | 77 |
| Hawaii | 4 | 81 |
| Illinois | 20 | 101 |
| Maryland | 10 | 111 |
| Massachusetts | 11 | 122 |
| New Jersey | 14 | 136 |
| New Mexico | 5 | 141 |
| New York | 29 | 170 |
| Rhode Island | 4 | 174 |
| Vermont | 3 | 177 |
| Washington | 12 | 189 |
So, fifteen states (counting D.C.), with 189 electoral votes, meaning there are 81 more needed. Scanning the list, it isn't hard to detect a partisan slant: the compact members are all blue or bluish purple states, and they are all within the same Venn circle as the Clinton states. There are six Clinton states, with 44 electoral votes, still outside the compact: Maine (4), Nevada (6), New Hampshire (4), Oregon (7), Virginia (13), and Minnesota (10). Three of these--Maine, Nevada, and Oregon--have a Democratic governor and Democratic majorities in both houses of the state legislature. It seems these are the likeliest candidates to join, and, if all six of them did, there would be only 37 more electoral votes needed to activate the compact. It's a hard slog but you can see how it could happen. Texas alone has 38 electoral votes, as do Pennsylvania and Ohio together. Florida and Wisconsin together have 39.
The main bar to activation of the compact is the difficulty of adding to its membership any Republican-leaning states. In two of the last five presidential elections, the current system has delivered the White House to a Republican candidate who was outpolled in the country by the Democrat. Calculations of partisan advantage therefore dictate opposition to the compact from red states. Of course, they find other high-minded sounding reasons to oppose it. That these reasons are so easily refuted is more evidence, if any was needed, that the real reason pertains to partisan advantage. See the above video for a methodical takedown of perhaps the most commonly advanced objection to awarding the presidency to the winner of the national popular vote.
I've written before about the swing-state phenomenon, the most poisonous fruit of the electoral college tree. Unless you live in one of these "battlegrounds," you have, practically speaking, no voice in a presidential election*, which is why the candidates never visit your state--they're too busy courting swing-state voters, the only ones who matter. Were the NPV compact activated, there'd be no swing states, and a vote would be a vote would be a vote would be a vote, no matter the state in which it was cast. Ballots would all weigh the same, and if your preferred presidential candidate received 65,845,063 votes you could gaze reverently on that terminal 3 and consider that, but for you, it would have been a 2 instead. Your vote counted.
Maybe you tell yourself that story now, but you'd be deceiving yourself.
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*Assuming you can't afford to donate large sums of cash.
UPDATE: Just saw this Law Boy tweet, which sums things up nicely:
sorry electoral college haters, but if we get rid of longstanding American institutions just because they're dumb as shit, make no sense, and were created to preserve slavery, then we're not going to have any longstanding American institutions left
— Law Boy, Esq. (@The_Law_Boy) March 19, 2019
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