Consider the following thought experiment.

We’re in the month of October and the country’s baseball fans are watching or, at least, following the World Series.

Team A wins games 1, 3, and 5; Team B wins games 2, 4, and 6.

The best-of-seven contest goes to a seventh game.

Team A emerges victorious in the final game and wins the Series.

Some fans of Team B do not accept the legitimacy of the Team A’s World Series win.  Why?  Turns out that in games 1, 3, 5 and 7, Team A won by a score of 1-0 in each game.  In games 2, 4, and 6, Team B won by a score of 10-0 in each game.  Over the course of the series, Team B had 30 runs to Team A’s four runs.  Team B, in the eyes of these fans, wins the series by a score of 30-4.

To any sane baseball fan, the idea that Team B should take home the Commissioner’s Trophy would be an absurdity.  And it is an absurdity.  The rule is: the team that wins four games wins the World Series, plain and simple.

This notion, that each game is a separate contest, however, does not sit well with many Americans in the way we elect our presidents.  Each U.S. presidential election is actually 51 elections.  Each of our 50 states and the District of Columbia have separate contests.

Each jurisdiction, depending on the size of the population, gets a specific number of electoral votes.  The presidential candidate that amasses at least 270 electoral votes (a majority) wins the election.

This is the system we have had in place since the country adopted the Constitution.

The problem arises when the candidate who wins the majority of electoral votes but loses the national vote, some Americans question the legitimacy of the winner.

The legitimacy question arises mainly due to the education system.  Many Americans simply were never taught in school about the Electoral College system and, more importantly, why it exists.  So, when George W. Bush won the 2000 election but was the runner up in the national vote, and, in the most recent election, Donald Trump won the electoral vote contest but also came up short in the national vote to Hillary Clinton, there were many who simply would not accept the outcome.

In fairness, at first glance, the way Americans elect the president is pretty kooky.  Why not just count the votes from across the country, and award the one with the highest tally with the keys to the White House?  Why have 51 individual contests?  And does it not seem a little unfair that some states (Florida, Ohio), under the current system, get lots of media attention and many visits from the candidates and some states (Oklahoma, Vermont) get virtually no attention during the general election?

Because of these and other questions, there is a movement — The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact or NPVIC or NPV – to sidestep the electoral vote process in favor of a national popular vote.  If enough states join the compact, each state will award its electoral votes to the national vote winner instead of the candidate who won the state contest.  As bad an idea as this is, I do not see the Compact as unconstitutional (I hope I am wrong).

NPV is a bad idea for the following reasons.

• It will urbanize presidential elections since much of the nation’s population is in major cities. Candidates will campaign and govern appealing to urban voters at the expense of the rural population.
• It is at odds with the federal character of the nation. The states came together and formed the nation with the understanding that the several sovereign states would elect the president.  NPV violates the spirit of that agreement.
• The Electoral College system isolates voter irregularities to the state where it occurs. If there is a need for a recount, it would be limited to the state or states where there are problems; there would be no need for a national recount.  NPV would nationalize the consequences of voter fraud.

This is not an exhaustive list of reasons, just three that strike me as important reasons not to go through with this proposed compact.

To my earlier devil’s advocate questions, the reasons I gave to reject NPV addresses why we should not just count the votes from around the country.  Having 51 separate contests will produce presidents who will have broad national appeal (Bill Clinton, in 1992, although only winning 43% of the national vote, won states in every part of the country: South, Northeast, Midwest, West Coast, Southwest, and Montana).

As far as the fact that some states get more attention than others, the states that are competitive have changed over time.  New York, in the modern era, is a lock for the Democrats, but in an earlier time, it was a swing state.  California is also currently a lock for the Democrats but for a good chunk of the 20^th century, its electoral votes were awarded to the Republican nominee.  And in 1916, it was one of the closest contests and the late vote tally kept Woodrow Wilson in the White House.  There other examples of states that were once competitive and now less so, and vice-versa.

The push to abolish or sidestep the Electoral College is not new.  An effort to abolish it by constitutional amendment was attempted a half-century ago.  That effort was the result of the previous (1968) presidential election where the popular vote was close, but Richard Nixon won a decisive victory in the Electoral College.

NPV has gained steam as a result of the 2016 election.  The fact that the national vote and electoral vote are at odds are only part of the reason for the increased effort.  For many Americans (numbered in the tens of millions), the election of Trump was an unacceptable result.  For these Americans, any electoral system that could produce that result is, on its face, illegitimate.

I also happen to believe that the desire to change the way we elect our presidents goes beyond any particular election or any president.  It even goes beyond the belief among some Democrats that given the fact that Republican nominees have lost the national popular vote in five of the last six presidential contests, the NPV would benefit them electorally.

There is talk of abolishing the U.S. Senate because each state, regardless of size, gets the same representation in the body.  Both the Senate and the Electoral College are anti-democratic creations of the Founding Fathers.  The men who gave us the Constitution and the nation are seen today as deeply flawed individuals who either owned slaves or tolerated slavery.  Many Americans today see the Constitution itself as a defense of the institution, an incorrect interpretation.  A rejection of the Electoral College is a just rebuke of the Founding Fathers to many.

Sadly, these feelings of rebuke cannot be easily reasoned away, even with a simple baseball metaphor.