Efforts to Change the Electoral College: Amendments and Compacts

Efforts to change the Electoral College have moved along four tracks: constitutional amendments (only two of the 700-plus proposed have ever been ratified), a state-level workaround called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, and running fights inside individual states over how they allocate their electoral votes.¹ None of these has produced outright abolition, but the system as it operates today is not the one the framers designed, and the pressure to keep changing it has not eased.

Public opinion has pulled in the direction of reform for years. A September 2024 Pew Research Center survey found 63% of Americans preferred choosing the president by national popular vote, against 35% who favored the current system; Gallup put the numbers at 58% to 40%.²³ The split has grown sharply partisan: 80% of Democrats favor a popular vote, while a majority of Republicans still prefer the Electoral College. That partisan divide is the single largest reason the reform tracks below keep stalling.

The Two Amendments That Actually Passed

The Twelfth Amendment (1804)

The original Constitution had each elector cast two votes for president without distinguishing between the presidency and vice presidency. In 1800, Democratic-Republican electors tried to elect Thomas Jefferson president and Aaron Burr vice president, but identical ballots produced a 73–73 tie that took the House 36 ballots to break.⁴

Ratified on September 25, 1804, the Twelfth Amendment required electors to cast separate ballots for president and vice president. It also narrowed contingent elections: if no presidential candidate wins a majority, the House chooses from the top three (rather than five), with each state delegation casting one vote; the Senate picks between the top two vice-presidential candidates.⁵ It has governed every presidential election since.

The Twenty-Third Amendment (1961)

The other successful change gave the District of Columbia the right to participate in presidential elections. Passed by Congress on June 16, 1960, and ratified on March 29, 1961, the amendment allocated D.C. a number of electors equal to what it would have as a state — but no more than the least populous state, meaning three in practice.⁶ D.C. residents first voted in 1964. A 1978 attempt to go further, granting D.C. full congressional representation and additional electors, failed after only 16 states ratified before the deadline expired in 1985.⁷

The Amendments That Failed

Every serious attempt to abolish or fundamentally restructure the Electoral College by amendment has failed, usually at the same chokepoint: the two-thirds-of-Congress, three-fourths-of-states threshold that gives structural beneficiaries of the current system an easy veto.

Lodge-Gossett Amendment (1950): Sponsored by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. (R-MA) and Representative Ed Gossett (D-TX), this proposal would have abolished the elector position and divided each state’s electoral votes proportionally by popular vote, calculated to three decimal places. The Senate approved it 64–27, but the House defeated it by roughly a two-thirds vote after liberal members and civil rights advocates concluded it was designed in part to dilute the electoral influence of Black voters and immigrant communities in large Northern states.⁸
Celler Amendment (1969): After Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968 with just 43% of the popular vote amid fears that George Wallace could throw the outcome to the House, Representative Emanuel Celler (D-NY) introduced an amendment to replace the Electoral College with a direct popular vote (40% to win, runoff otherwise). The House passed it 338–70 with bipartisan support that included Gerald Ford. It died in the Senate under a filibuster led largely by southern senators who feared a national popular vote would diminish their region’s political influence.⁹¹⁰
Bayh Amendment (1979): Senator Birch Bayh (D-IN) introduced another direct-election amendment that received a Senate vote of 51–48 in favor — a majority, but short of the two-thirds required. The House never voted.¹

Historian Alexander Keyssar has observed that parties tend to oppose Electoral College reform when they believe the current structure gives them a competitive edge; Republicans in the 1980s concluded the system favored them, ending a period of bipartisan reform energy that had lasted decades.¹⁰ Republican willingness to consider reform dropped sharply after 2016, when Donald Trump won the presidency while losing the popular vote by nearly 2.9 million ballots.¹¹

In the current Congress, Representatives Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) and Jared Golden (D-ME) introduced H.Res.20 to establish a bipartisan Select Committee on Electoral Reform, backed by a letter from more than 170 political scientists. The resolution has not advanced beyond introduction.¹²

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact

Because amending the Constitution has proven so hard, reformers built a workaround. Under the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, participating states agree to award all their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of how their own state voted. The compact only takes effect once states holding at least 270 electoral votes have joined, ensuring the popular-vote winner would automatically win the Electoral College.¹³

As of mid-2026, 19 jurisdictions have enacted the compact, holding 209 electoral votes between them — 61 short of the activation threshold.¹⁴ Virginia was the most recent to join, when Governor Abigail Spanberger signed the legislation on April 13, 2026.¹⁵ Members include California, Illinois, New York, Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont, the District of Columbia, and Virginia.

Membership is not always stable. Maine enacted the compact in April 2024, and in 2025 the legislature considered LD 252 to repeal that membership. The Maine House voted 76–71 to repeal, but the Senate voted 18–16 against, and both chambers officially killed the repeal on June 17, 2025.¹⁶

Legal Challenges Waiting in the Wings

If the compact ever reaches 270 electoral votes, litigation is essentially certain. Scholars are divided on whether it would survive.

One line of attack invokes the Compact Clause of Article I, Section 10, which requires congressional consent for interstate agreements. Under Virginia v. Tennessee (1893) and U.S. Steel Corp. v. Multistate Tax Commission (1978), congressional approval is required only when a compact encroaches on federal supremacy.¹⁷ Compact supporters argue this test is met because states are simply exercising their existing Article II authority over elector appointment. Professor Derek Muller has argued for a broader reading that would also require approval when a compact diminishes the political power of non-participating states, which the NPVIC would do.¹⁸

Legal scholar Norman Williams has argued separately that while Article II appears to give states broad power over elector appointment, the framers explicitly rejected a direct popular vote, and no state has ever appointed electors based on votes cast outside its own borders.¹⁹ Others have argued the compact amounts to a fundamental alteration of the Electoral College’s constitutional procedures that can only lawfully be achieved through a formal Article V amendment.²⁰ The Supreme Court has not ruled on the NPVIC and has never invalidated an interstate compact for lacking congressional consent. Until the compact hits 270, these questions stay theoretical.

The Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022

The most recent structural change to how the Electoral College operates came from Congress, not the states. After the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol exposed how ambiguous the 1887 Electoral Count Act had become, Congress passed the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act as part of an omnibus appropriations bill in late 2022.²¹

The law made several significant changes:

The vice president’s role during the joint session is codified as “solely ministerial,” foreclosing any argument that the vice president can accept, reject, or adjudicate disputed electoral votes.²²
The threshold for forcing a floor debate on electoral votes rose from a single member of each chamber to one-fifth of both chambers. Permissible grounds for objection are narrowed to two: that electors were not lawfully certified, or that an elector’s vote was not “regularly given.”²³
The governor, or another official designated by state law before the election, is the sole authority for submitting a state’s official certificate of electors. Congress may not accept slates from alternative officials.²²
Disputes over elector certifications go to a three-judge federal panel with expedited direct appeal to the Supreme Court.²³
The act repealed an 1845 provision that had allowed state legislatures to declare a “failed election” and appoint electors themselves. Any extension of Election Day is now limited to “extraordinary and catastrophic” events as defined by laws enacted before Election Day.²³

The ECRA imposed federal deadlines that forced states to update their own election statutes. At least 18 states, from California and Colorado to Texas and Montana, have enacted legislation aligning their canvassing, recount, and certification timelines with the ECRA’s requirement that results be finalized 36 days after Election Day.²¹ Implementation has been uneven; Arizona found its existing recount timelines needed significant adjustment, while others were already close to compliant.²⁴

Chiafalo v. Washington and the End of Faithless Electors

One long-standing vulnerability of the Electoral College was the “faithless elector” — an elector who refuses to vote for the candidate they pledged to support. Roughly 180 of more than 23,000 electoral votes across the system’s history have been faithless. In 2016, seven electors cast ballots for someone other than their pledged candidate, a modern record.²⁵

The Supreme Court closed that door unanimously in Chiafalo v. Washington, decided July 6, 2020. Writing for the Court, Justice Elena Kagan held that states have the constitutional authority to enforce elector pledges, including through fines or removal and replacement of faithless electors. The Court found Article II gives states the “broadest power of determination” over elector appointments, and that “our whole experience as a Nation” shows electors serve as “trusty transmitters of other people’s decisions.”²⁶ Justice Thomas concurred in the result but grounded state authority in the Tenth Amendment rather than Article II. As of the ruling, 32 states and D.C. had elector pledge laws, and 15 states had laws permitting removal or replacement of faithless electors.²⁵

State Allocation Fights: Nebraska and Maine

Some of the sharpest recent battles have been in the two states that split their electoral votes by congressional district rather than winner-take-all. Nebraska adopted its district method in 1991, and the state’s second district — centered on Omaha — has become a recurring source of partisan tension after going for Barack Obama in 2008 and Joe Biden in 2020.

In 2024, Nebraska Republicans pushed to scrap the district system and return to winner-take-all through Legislative Bill 764, introduced by Senator Loren Lippincott. Governor Jim Pillen and former President Trump publicly backed the effort.²⁷ Senator Julie Slama tried to force a vote by attaching the measure as an amendment to an existing bill; the effort secured only eight of the 23 votes needed.²⁸ A renewed effort in 2025 died to a filibuster.²⁹

Maine, which has used the district method since 1969, has seen activity from the opposite direction. In 2024 it joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. A 2025 bill (LD 1356) proposed switching Maine to winner-take-all contingent on Nebraska doing the same, but the Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee voted it down.²⁹ The separate repeal bill targeting Maine’s NPVIC membership passed the House but was blocked in the Senate.¹⁶

Why the System Keeps Resisting Change

The pattern across every track is the same. Reform proposals stall not because they lack public support — most Americans have preferred a popular vote for years — but because the beneficiaries of the current arrangement hold veto power at every level. A constitutional amendment needs 38 states; small states with disproportionate electoral weight have little reason to sign on. The NPVIC needs 270 electoral votes’ worth of members, but the states most likely to join are those already reliably in one party’s column. Individual states like Nebraska and Maine face a strategic trap: no state wants to unilaterally change its allocation method if doing so would reduce its own party’s electoral advantage. As one analysis put it, California will not abandon winner-take-all while Texas retains it.³⁰

What has actually changed the system, then, is not abolition but consolidation around its current form: the Twelfth Amendment fixed a design flaw, the Twenty-Third added D.C., Chiafalo locked electors into their pledges, and the ECRA hardened the counting procedure against manipulation. Each of these was easier to pass than abolition because none of them altered which party the system favored. The larger question — whether the popular-vote winner should become president — remains where it has been for two centuries: proposed constantly, adopted never.

1
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2
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3
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4
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5
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8
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13
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16
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17
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18
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19
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20
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21
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22
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23
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24
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25
SCOTUSblog. Opinion Analysis: Court Upholds Faithless Elector Laws
26
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27
NBC News. Trump, GOP Leaders Push Change Nebraska Electoral Votes Winner Take All
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1011 Now. Bill Looking to Reinstate Winner Take All System in Nebraska
29
Maine Morning Star. After Joining Movement to Elect President by Popular Vote Last Year, Maine Poised to Undo Decision
30
Harvard Ash Center. The Electoral College and Our Broken Presidential Election System