Spanberger Advances Anti-Electoral College “Soft Coup Against America”

One of the nation-shattering issues hardly ever discussed, distracted as we are with frivolity, is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC). This is the state-led scheme to circumvent the Electoral College and force presidential elections to be decided by popular vote. It’s dangerous not just because it would essentially enable densely populated cities to determine the president for the whole country. It also would profoundly magnify vote fraud’s effect, allowing those localities to steal any and every election.

And now Governor Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) has given the NPVIC another shot in the arm. She has just signed a bill making Virginia part of the compact. This places the NPVIC a mere 48 votes away from national implementation.

Spanberger is, as many know, the politician who campaigned as a “moderate” in 2025. She then predictably began effecting far-left governance the moment she entered office. (This is why, in general elections, you vote for the party, not the person. For the person will almost always vote with his party.)

Now, it’s not surprising that hard-left Spanberger would push the NPVIC. After all, the compact would likely make it impossible for a Republican to be elected president. Note here that 18 of our largest 20 cities are run by Democrats. The two “exceptions,” Dallas and Fort Worth, have GOP mayors but primarily liberal city governments. And this score of cities boasts more than 10 percent (about 35 million people) of the country’s population.

Before proceeding, it’s helpful to review precisely what the NPVIC is. As USConstitution.net informs, it

is one of those ideas that sounds like a constitutional amendment but is not. It does not abolish the Electoral College. It does not rewrite a single clause. What it tries to do is simpler and, in practice, potentially disruptive: use the rules we already have to make the national popular vote determine who gets the presidency.

The compact is an agreement among participating states and the District of Columbia. DC is not a state, but it can participate through its own enabling law and, under the Twenty-Third Amendment, it carries three electoral votes.

Each member jurisdiction promises that, once the compact is in effect, it will award all of its electoral votes to the candidate who wins the national popular vote across all 50 states and DC. [Emphasis in original.]

The NPVIC takes effect once the signatory states have an electoral-vote total of 270. The compact now stands at 222 with Virginia’s accession.

A Furtive Revolution

Writing about this Sunday was commentator and national election-validity advocate Marly Hornik. Calling the NPVIC effort a “soft coup against America” and quoting the “National Popular Vote!” website, she relates:

Six additional states with 65 electoral votes (Arizona, Michigan, New Hampshire, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) are especially promising places for obtaining the 48 electoral votes needed before 2028 [for NPVIC activation].

Hornik then warns about how precarious our situation is, writing:

With the coalition falling hard on political lines, the situation is troubling. All six of their targeted states have gubernatorial elections this November, with proven Bill of Rights abusers like Jocelyn Benson of Michigan favored to win. Although one or even both houses in some states have voted to join the popular vote compact at various times, the governor’s signature has been the greatest hurdle. If the opportunity to codify this popular-vote scheme is seized by incoming administrations, a permanent woke regime in America that ends limited government and equality under the law is a real risk.

Possible Remedy

This said, Hornik insists all is not lost. She cites James Madison, who in The Federalist, No. 43 warned that

the minority of citizens may become a majority of persons, by the accession of alien residents, of a casual concourse of adventurers, or of those whom the Constitution of the State has not admitted to the rights of suffrage…. [Emphasis in original.]

This is relevant because the NPVIC-enabling states tend to have lax voting laws, which invite ineligible-voter participation. Hornik then points out that Madison was concerned about states undermining the national government via federal-election manipulation. This led to the Elections Clause (U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 4). This grants Congress power to override states on the “time, place, and manner” of federal elections.

Second, Hornik states that post-Civil War, the 14th Amendment’s Section 2 was designed to punish states that deny or abridge qualified-citizen voting rights. A state’s congressional representation (and thus Electoral College votes) can be reduced commensurate with the number of disenfranchised qualified voters. Hornik asserts that this was a general safeguard against disloyalty and electoral betrayal, not solely a race-based measure.

These two constitutional provisions should be used, Hornik insists, to thwart NPVIC-enabling states. Laying out her case further, she writes:

When states decline to legally qualify voters by failing to verify identity, citizenship, and eligibility under State law, they commit multiple injuries:

• First, they fail to prevent crime via illegal voting.
• Second, they fail to protect the right to choose representatives, the core promise of our republican form of government, and the second sentence of the US Constitution.
• Third, States usurp the right to choose when they administer elections without controlling access and certify elections that include illegal votes. Sometimes there are a lot of illegal votes, yet representatives are sent to Congress or the White House regardless.

Note here that none of the 19 NPVIC-signatory states requires strict photo voter ID. This means that they can’t know whom their voters are. It is, however, their duty to know. Regarding this, Hornik wonders, absent an implicit state commitment to run elections responsibly, why would we have ratified the Constitution? “Why would we have authorized a process that could dilute our representation?” she asks.

Intolerable Situation

One answer is that in 1789 and for a long time afterwards, the federal government was small, as the Constitution dictates. For this reason, who occupied the presidency wasn’t too relevant in the daily lives of citizens. Most laws affecting them were made on the state and local levels.

Those days are long gone. Now the feds regulate light bulbs, washing machines, refrigerators, furnaces, dishwashers, air conditioners, shower-head flow rates, minimum wages, and beyond. So when big-government-enabling states game the system to control the presidency, they’re exercising tyranny over states playing by the rules. It’s thus no wonder that radical leftists are giddy that “the next president could finally be elected by the popular vote.”

The good news is that thwarting the NPVIC may not require Hornik’s involved remedy, as it appears unconstitutional. As The Princeton Legal Journal wrote in 2021, the NPVIC

constitutes a violation of the Compact Clause, which states that “No State shall, without the Consent of Congress…enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State.”

So the Supreme Court may nix the compact should it be implemented.

What’s for sure is what would happen under a popular-vote system. California and other left-wing, one-party states would have great incentive to kick their vote-fraud operations into high gear. (I’ve reported on electoral fraud’s reality previously.) They could conceivably deliver millions of fraudulent Democratic votes most undemocratically, ensuring that the United States would become a one-party country. That would make us a nation of statists, by statists, and for statists — but only those in charge. Be warned, useful-idiot statists need not apply.