Every Vote for President Should Count the Same, Including Utah’s
The National Popular Vote Compact is 48 electoral votes from taking effect. I think it’s good for Utah, and here’s my answer to the strongest argument against it.
Quick question: when did a presidential nominee last hold a general-election rally in Utah?
If you can’t remember, you’re not alone. In 2024, FairVote counted 261 in-person campaign events between the conventions and Election Day. Ninety-four percent were in seven swing states. Thirty-two states, Utah among them, didn’t get a single visit.
That’s the problem the National Popular Vote Compact is trying to fix, and it’s closer than most people realize.
Where things stand
The compact is an agreement among states. Each member promises to give its electors to whoever wins the most votes nationwide. It only switches on once the members add up to 270 electoral votes, enough to decide the election. Virginia joined in April, which brought the total to 18 states plus DC, with 222 electoral votes. After this month’s midterms, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nevada are all in play. Together they would push it past 270, in time for 2028 if they act before July 20 of that year.
Why I support it
It makes Utah matter. Today our six electoral votes are counted before the polls even open, so neither party has a reason to show up. With a national count, a vote in Sandy is worth exactly as much as a vote in Scranton. Candidates would have to come compete for it.
It isn’t a partisan trick. People assume this only helps Democrats. In 2024 Trump carried the national vote by about 2.3 million, so if the compact had been in effect, every member state would have cast its electors for him. Utah Republicans have sponsored this bill here before. Equal votes aren’t a left or right idea.
No more elections decided by a few hundred votes in one state. Remember 2000? Florida went to Bush by 537 votes out of nearly 6 million, and that one state decided the presidency. The result was 36 days of recounts, hanging chads and lawsuits, ending when the Supreme Court stopped the recount 5–4 in Bush v. Gore. Meanwhile, Gore led the national count by 543,895 votes, about a thousand times the Florida margin. Whatever you think of how 2000 turned out, under a national count the Florida recount would not have changed the winner, and the Supreme Court would never have had to step in. A national race could still be close enough to need a recount someday. But the bigger the pool of votes, the harder it is for a few hundred ballots in one county to swing the presidency.
Small states keep their protection. The Founders gave small states equal power in the Senate, two senators each no matter the population. Nothing in the compact touches that.
What were the Founders thinking?
Defenders of the Electoral College often say the Founders knew what they were doing. They did. So it’s worth asking what problems they were solving, and whether those problems still exist.
1. Keep Congress from picking the president. Many delegates first wanted Congress to choose the president. Others worried a president picked by Congress would owe it favors. Electors were the compromise. Still relevant? Yes, and the compact keeps it. Congress still doesn’t choose.
2. A wise filter. In Federalist 68, Hamilton wrote that electors would be thoughtful citizens who would weigh the candidates and guard against unfit or corrupt choices. Still relevant? The goal is, but the filter is gone. Electors today are party loyalists picked to vote as pledged. In 2020 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously, in Chiafalo v. Washington, that states can punish electors who break their pledge. Nobody is deliberating anymore.
3. Balance big states and small states. Each state’s electors equal its House seats plus its two senators, which gives small states a little extra weight. Still relevant? Partly. But extra weight is worth nothing if no one campaigns for it. Utah’s six electoral votes haven’t bought us a visit in years. Small states’ real protection is the Senate, and that doesn’t change.
4. The limits of 1787. Thirteen states, news that moved at the speed of a horse, and no national parties. Most voters had no way to know a candidate from another state. Still relevant? No. Every voter in America can watch the same debate on the same night.
5. The slavery compromise. Electors were apportioned like House seats, and House seats counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person, which gave slave states extra electors for people who couldn’t vote. Historians still argue over how much this shaped the design. Still relevant? No. The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments ended it.
One more thing. Winner-take-all isn’t in the Constitution. The Founders left it to each state legislature to decide how to choose electors, and early on many legislatures simply picked the electors themselves. Giving all of a state’s electors to its statewide winner is a state law that 48 states adopted later. The compact uses that exact same power the Founders gave the states.
The best argument against it
I’ve heard it from friends I respect: under a popular vote, campaigns will camp out in New York and Los Angeles and forget the Mountain West.
Here’s why I don’t buy it. The New York metro area is about 6% of the country. The ten biggest metros together hold roughly a quarter. You can’t win a national majority from a few skylines, and big cities aren’t one voting bloc anyway. Millions of Republicans live in Los Angeles and New York. Most important, Utah already gets ignored under the current system. Six safe electoral votes have never bought us a visit.
Others say states should split their electors by congressional district, the way Maine and Nebraska do. That just swaps swing states for swing districts. It also hands even more power to whoever draws the district lines, and Utahns have seen enough of that fight.
One thing I’d add
The compact’s critics argue it needs Congress’s approval, and a court fight is likely. The last thing this country needs is a presidential election decided by a lawsuit in the middle of a campaign. Congress should hold a clear, open vote on the compact before 2028, so everyone knows the rules before a single ballot is cast.
Every American’s vote for president should count the same. That includes ours.