The real solution is to allocate delegates proportionally to how citizens vote, as is done in Nebraska and a couple other states. This achieves exactly the same purpose as the NPVC but is actually politically tractable.
No state has any incentive to assign its delgates to a person the citizens of the state didn’t vote for. You can do what the NPVC does and make it contingent upon everyone playing along, but that requires everyone to play along and is incredibly tenuous. Even if it ever goes into effect, as soon as states allocate delegates to someone who wasn’t the most popular candidate in their state they’ll pull it, and the whole thing will fall apart.
Every state has incentive to allocate its delegates proportionally. That’s exactly what people want. They want that more than winner takes all. It doesn’t require a huge chuck of states to buy into it amd it isn’t tenuous. But it accomplishes the same goal; if states allocate delegates proportionally to how they vote, then the most popular candidate gets the most delegates. If you’re in one of the many states that has winner takes all, advocate to do what the few more democratic states have already adopted and are happy with.
This only solves it if you also make the number of delegates for each state be proportional to its population size. California has 68 times the population of Wyoming but only 18 times the number of electoral votes.
What you’re describing has never resulted in the popular vote winner losing the electoral college. The popular vote winner has always lost because states allocate delegates as a winner-take-all system.
I’m not sure what you mean. Of course it’s never happened because we’ve never done it that way.
If you’re saying that if you go back and calculate previous elections, then it never would have made a difference, that doesn’t mean it could not happen. Growing up I learned that there was only one time in history that the popular vote didn’t match the EC, but now it’s become a constant threat. If it becomes a viable path then eventually it is bound to be exploited.
What you are talking about simply isn’t functionally equivalent to just straight up popular vote, for the reason I described. Votes are not worth the same amount in different places.
