National Popular Vote Interstate Compact

All hail NATIONALPOPULARVOTEINTERSTATECOMPACTACHUSETTS: An unbeatable political behemoth possessing all the benefits of being a BIG STATE with none of the drawbacks.

Note: If you view this graphic while wearing prescription glasses with cheap lenses, the 3D-effect is pretty damn awesome...

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (a.k.a. NPVIC) is a gentleman's agreement amongst less than half of the currently fifty (50) states of the United States to award all of their 270-plus electoral votes in one lump sum solely to one chosen Presidential candidate in every subsequent Presidential election, as if they were one friggin' gigantic monolithic state (sort of like a supersized California). By successfully disenfranchising every other state in the Union, this is somehow supposed to promote the Democratic Party Spirit of Democracy in ways that even the Founding Fathers could never have hoped to achieve, what with all them powdered-wig aristocrats screwing everything up.

The well-intentioned and ultimate goal of the NPVIC is to provide for a truly fair and free election. Since providing a truly fair and free election is fundamentally impossible, the NPVIC has settled on the next best thing, which is to artificially simulate what a truly fair and free election supposedly feels like. And, as every true politician knows deep down in his bitterly cold and unfeeling heart, feelings are the only things that matter. If a voter in California wants to feel good about himself by being on the winning side for a change, he will no longer have to go through the inconvenience of relocating to North Dakota where it's too damned cold to vote. With the mechanisms of the NPVIC compact firmly in force in key areas of the country but not others, a Californian's presidential ballot will become more like a wise financial investment, in that it retains its value against the ravages of overpopulation.

The overriding genius of the NPVIC is that it cleverly utilizes the awesome leveraging power of the very thing that it presumably sets out to destroy, namely the Electoral College (which truly sucks).

Why does the Electoral College suck?

H.C. Christy's famous painting of the First Meeting of the Electoral College (1789), in which the electors cast all 538 electoral votes for George Washington. John Adams came in a strong second with 0 electoral votes, even though he was in France at the time. Over the next few centuries, many other people were eventually allowed to think that voting for President actually matters.

There are many reasons why the Electoral College truly sucks. It's unfair, it's not ethical, it's unfair, it's a bad influence on impressionable children, it's unfair, and 18 more perfectly logical reasons can be listed right off the top of our heads. Did we mention that it's also unfair?

The Constitution takes too long to read

The Electoral College sucks because the average American citizen simply doesn't have sufficient time or patience to sit down and read all four pages of the United States Constitution. So when he finds out from well-trusted sources on the Internet that his vote for President (an immensely honorable privilege which many have fought and bled and died an agonizing death for, assuming he even actually bothers to get off his ass to vote) is somehow taken as slightly less than face value, he goes berserk. Well, wouldn't you?

Winner-take-all is unfair to the losers

The current electoral Presidential election system utilizes a grossly unfair rule known as the "winner-take-all rule", which is one of the many all-American traditions instituted by George Washington. Under this particular rule, every election awards 100 percent of the election to the winner of the election. According to the loser of the election, that truly sucks; and occasionally even the winner complains about it. Well, actually, the winner is not really complaining about having won, but he sure as hell complains a lot about all the complaining he has to listen to, mostly from the loser. Then the loser complains that the winner is not justified to be complaining about how much the loser is complaining, seeing that the winner had already won in a grossly unfairly manner. Such is the nature of politics.

Some states have all the luck

Some states have all the luck. Some states have all the pain. Some states get all the breaks. Some states do nothing but complain.

Other reasons the Electoral College sucks

• The Founding Fathers were not omniscient.
• The Founding Fathers were secretly plotting (229 years in advance) to get us into this horrific mess all along.
• The Electoral College causes civil wars.
• The Electoral College violates the fundamental laws of fairness.
• The Electoral College violates the fundamental laws of logic.
• The Electoral College violates the fundamental laws of arithmetic.
• The Electoral College violates the fundamental laws of physics.
• Unlike individual people, individual states are greedy bastards.
• A dead guy could be elected President. Only necrophiliacs would want that.
• Being worth three-fifths of a voter is demeaning.
• Electoral college appointees blindly vote the way they are told.
• Electoral college appointees cannot be trusted to vote the way they are told.
• An immensely popular actor could be elected President. Absolutely nobody would want that.
• Today's voters cannot be expected to read the fine print on their ballot forms, to wit:

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector. The Electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves; they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President, and they shall make distinct lists of all persons voted for as President, and all persons voted for as Vice-President and of the number of votes for each, which lists they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted. The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice. Holy crap, this is really confusing! And if the House of Representatives shall not choose a President whenever the right of choice shall devolve upon them, before the fourth day of March next following, then the Vice-President shall act as President, as in the case of the death or other constitutional disability of the President. The person having the greatest number of votes as Vice-President, shall be the Vice-President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed, and if no person have a majority, then from the two highest numbers on the list, the Senate shall choose the Vice-President; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two-thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice. But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.

• Donald Trump ('nuff said).

A loophole must be exploited at all costs

If enough people want to get something done, they sure as hell get it done, by golly. Unfortunately, the Constitution has been specifically tailored in advance to keep the most powerful nation on Earth at least 100 years behind the times. Is it any wonder then why we never went back to the Moon? Constitutional amendments are so fucking hard to ratify that it makes you wonder how we ever managed to abolish alcohol in the first place. Therefore, a loophole must be exploited at all costs, no matter how small and contrived. In 2017 (long after the disastrous election of 2016), the vital loophole was at long last discovered, mostly because nobody noticed it before. Here, then, is the loophole:

Members of the Electoral College, unlike most humans, can be affected by external stimuli.

It has long been assumed that members of the Electoral College constitute nothing more than a rubber-stamp body, incapable of being swayed by persuasive arguments since they have no brains. In the 2016 election, six independently-brained electors unexpectedly dispelled that preconceived notion for all time. They can, in fact, be bribed, extorted, deceived, threatened, brainwashed, hypnotized, gently prodded, emotionally abused, drugged, or even deprived of sleep. Nowhere in the Constitution does it explicitely prohibit the utilization of any of these potentially useful tools for the purposes of coercion. Okay, sure, Federal laws may have something to say otherwise, but the Constitution is clearly more important than any Federal law. It only suffices to get a whole bunch of disgruntled states to agree to actually do all this stuff in a coordinated fashion. That's exactly how the United States was founded in the first place.

An enormous chunk of valuable real estate, free for the taking

Having taking important lessons from power-hungry industrial corporations on how to sneakily gain power and hold on to it, the creators of the NPVIC are now well on their way to carving a sinewy and bizarrely-shaped chunk of valuable real estate out of the very heart of the national heartland and leave everybody else out in the cold to suffer. But not to worry, because the NPVIC promises that everybody else's vote will still somehow count for something, so as long as the NPVIC is allowed to hold (and play) all of the winning cards. Honestly, can the Constitution itself do better than that? I didn't think so.

But, how will NPVIC election procedures work (theoretically)?

How NPVIC election procedures will work (theoretically)

When the Electoral College is finally bypassed, every single vote cast by each voter will actually count towards electing the President.

Election Day

On Election Day for the Downtrodden Masses (the first Tuesday of November, the day that's supposed to matter but never previously did), the people naively vote for one of their two (and only two) allowable choices for President. Every single non-FOX media outlet will live-stream an official tally of every single person who bothers to vote by conducting exit polls, which are even more accurate than the actual elections. As the numerical drama escalates into the millions, millions of stay-at-home non-voters will get to be entertained by placing wagers on the pre-ordained outcome, until such time that they get bored and switch to something else.

Amassing the raw data

Over the following six weeks prior to Election Day for the Rich and Privileged (the third Tuesday of December, a day that should no longer matter but will still be observed nonetheless), the NPVIC states make a seemingly-valiant attempt to obtain official election returns from non-NPVIC state governments. First, they politely ask for the official results from non-NPVIC states. (Get real.) A few days later, the NPVIC loudly demands that the non-NPVIC states hand over the requested information. (Lots'a luck, pal.) Inevitably, the NPVIC threatens to take devastating legal action against all who oppose it. (Oh, we're really scared, now.) Then the lawsuits fly. The Supreme Court will summarily dismiss all of them because they sure as hell don't want to get involved in what is essentially a "political powder-keg that could destroy the nation as we know it". Cowards.

Massaging the raw data

For some unfathomable reason, some states will continue to award their own electoral votes according to the way their own people voted, just as they have done for countless centuries. But all for naught, because one secret nameless NPVIC official will be hiding out in a top-secret bunker and come to his own personal and private conclusions on exactly how accurate the alleged numbers of votes from each state are likely to be. Sometimes he will be forced to make up completely arbitrary numbers in order to counter the misinformation coming out of non-compact state legislatures trying like hell to sabotage the entire process. But that's okay, since they (those outside the compact) will no longer possess enough electoral votes to make a diddly-jack of a difference. Once the final vote tallies miraculously match the non-FOX media outlet's months-old statistical projections, and just in the nick of time, the true winners of the election can finally relax in the full knowledge that disaster has been averted.

NPVIC secures the final victory

Come December, the 270-odd electors will get their final marching orders and conglomerate into one unified voice. When the NPVIC-appointed collective speaks, the election is over.