Your state’s electors should match your state’s voters.

No, because winner-take-all doesn’t belong to one party. Both use it wherever they’re strong, and both leave the other side’s voters with nothing. In 2024 the four states that left the most votes without an elector were California, Texas, Florida, and New York.¹ California’s 6.08 million Trump voters and Texas’s 4.84 million Harris voters both ended up ignored.

Fixing it asks some honesty of both sides. In the elections we re-ran, Fair Slate took electors from whoever won under winner-take-all and gave them to the runner-up: from Trump in 2016 and 2024, and from Biden in 2020. The shift follows the electorate, not a party, and balanced compacts make sure each side gives up only what it gets back.

Those results show how people voted under winner-take-all, not how they’d vote if every vote counted. Turnout already shows the difference. In 2024, about 70.6% of voting-age adults voted in the seven battleground states, against 63.6% everywhere else, according to an analysis by National Popular Vote.³⁵ When a state’s result is a foregone conclusion, fewer people bother. If every state turned out like the battleground states, about 13.7 million more people would have voted in 2024, roughly six times Trump’s national margin of 2.3 million. With Fair Slate, every state has electors in play, and a turnout shift that size could have changed any of these elections.

The stability is reassuring, too. In four of the last five elections, Fair Slate would have picked the same winner, and in 2016 the House would have decided. That shows this isn’t a radical change. It doesn’t upend the Electoral College or tilt it toward a party. It just does what it set out to do: it implements the popular vote.

If you’ve wanted to “switch to the popular vote,” this is how. There’s no single national election to switch. Each state runs its own presidential election, and Fair Slate makes every one of them a popular vote.

Slavery was a major part of it, and that history shouldn’t be minimized. At the Constitutional Convention, James Madison argued that a direct popular vote had a serious problem for the South: far fewer of its people could vote, since enslaved people could not, so Southern states would carry less weight. Choosing the president through electors addressed slave states’ concerns.³⁶ Because electors were tied to House seats, the three-fifths clause gave slave states extra electoral votes, and the legal scholar Akhil Reed Amar argues those votes decided the election of 1800.³⁷ Historians still debate how central slavery was, alongside the framers’ distrust of direct democracy, their wish to keep Congress from choosing the president, and the difficulty of a national election in 1787.³⁸

But why the Electoral College was created isn’t why it remains. It survives because it’s written into the Constitution, amendments are very hard to pass, and smaller states remain wary of being outvoted by larger ones, even without an issue like slavery dividing them.

An unjust origin doesn’t settle how best to improve it. That history strengthens the case for change, but it doesn’t change the practical obstacles: an amendment needs broad agreement from states with little reason to give it, and a compact like the NPVIC has to hold together permanently. Fair Slate starts with what states can do now, and addresses the most persistent issues it causes voters today.

Not for president. Gerrymandering is drawing district lines to favor a party, and it shapes House and state legislative seats. Presidential electors aren’t chosen by district. Forty-eight states and DC award them on the statewide vote, and nobody can redraw a state’s borders. Each state’s number of electors comes from the census, not from how its districts are drawn.

The exceptions are Maine and Nebraska, which award one elector per congressional district: 5 of the 538. That’s the only place district lines touch the Electoral College.

If anything, winner-take-all is the ultimate gerrymander. It treats the whole state as one district and hands every elector to whoever wins it, so millions of voters on the losing side get no representation at all, no matter how the interior lines are drawn. Fair Slate keeps the statewide count, so there are still no lines to draw (see why not districts).

Proportional elections with multiple winners would help the House too. Larger districts that each elect several members would blunt gerrymandering there, and the idea has been proposed in Congress as the Fair Representation Act.³⁹ For now, though, it isn’t allowed: since 1967, federal law has required that House members be elected from single-member districts, “no district to elect more than one Representative.”⁴⁰ This, in particular, is why gerrymandering is so successful.

Less than people assume. It’s tempting to treat a national popular vote as the ideal everyone else already has, and this plan as settling for less. But it isn’t a given, even abroad. Some countries, like France, Brazil, and Mexico, do elect their presidents directly. Many established democracies don’t. In parliamentary systems like the UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, and Japan, voters elect a parliament, and whoever can command a majority there becomes prime minister or chancellor.⁴¹ That’s closer to Congress choosing the president than to a national popular vote. Germany even chooses its president through a convention of federal lawmakers and delegates from its state parliaments, an electoral college in all but name.⁴²

The Electoral College sits between the two. Voters choose directly, but state by state, and each state’s result becomes a slate of electors. The design is defensible, and other democracies use versions of it. Plenty of Americans value it for that reason: they care about federalism and the role states play, and see a national popular vote, which would take state lines out of the count entirely, as too drastic a change. The trouble is the last step: winner-take-all rounds every state’s result to all or nothing. Fair Slate keeps the structure and fixes the rounding.

They do get extra weight, but less than it seems, and it varies widely. Every state gets two electors for its senators, so the smallest states get the most electors per voter. Here are the seven jurisdictions with 3 electors, measured against the national rate of about 3.5 electors per million votes cast in 2024:¹

Together they carry about 12 extra electors. That’s comparable to what winner-take-all misallocated in just two mid-sized states in 2024, one won by each party: 8 in Georgia and 7 in New Jersey, electors that went to the other side because each state’s whole slate went to its winner. Counting every over-represented state, the small-state advantage adds up to about 41 electors. Winner-take-all sent 225 electors to a different candidate than a proportional split would have.

The two problems differ in kind, too. The small-state advantage makes some votes count extra. Winner-take-all makes millions of votes count for nothing. Both are worth fixing: enlarging the House would shrink the small-state advantage, and it would also make this reform more precise (here’s how the two fit together). For every state’s numbers, see how much a vote is worth.

State legislatures decide how their electors are awarded, so they’re the ones who would make this change. In a compact, the majority party gives up some electors at home and gets the same number back from a state that leans the other way. Beyond that, the reasons depend on the state.

Swing states are trading away risk. In a close race, either party can lose every elector in any given year, and nearly half the state’s voters end up with no electors at all. Splitting them guarantees each party its share, whichever way the state tips.

Safe states are trading away being ignored. A shoo-in for one party gets little attention from campaigns, because its result is already known. Once its electors are split, every vote there can move one, and the state gets a seat at the table as an electorate worth competing for.

In the end, though, it’s voters who win with this plan, not parties. Every voter’s ballot counts toward an elector, whichever side they’re on. So the real push has to come from them: if voters want it badly enough, they can elect state legislators who will make it happen.

Some do, and that may make them slow to switch. Swing states get the campaign visits, the attention, and the promises. But the people most attached to that status are often the state’s politicians, who collect the attention, more than its voters.

For voters, being a swing state comes with difficulties. They get buried in TV ads, mailers, and text messages for months. And in a close race, nearly half of them end up with no electors at all, whichever way the state tips. Fair Slate guarantees each side its share.

If swing states do hold out, the order changes, not the idea. The first movers could be near-swing states that campaigns have stopped visiting, paired with each other: Ohio with Minnesota, Virginia with North Carolina, or New Hampshire with Montana, all matches from the table. Under winner-take-all, their results look settled. With Fair Slate, a few of their electors are in play every year, and they’re worth campaigning in again.

A Fair Slate state is neither a swing state nor a safe state, because safe and swing states are themselves artifacts of winner-take-all. Like a safe state, it knows most of its electors will follow its voters, with no all-or-nothing gamble. Like a swing state, it has electors in play every year, so campaigns still have a reason to show up. That mix can appeal to states on either side of the line.

It can’t stay perfectly balanced, and it doesn’t need to. Partnering states is meant to roughly balance the sting of giving up electors at the start. It can’t guarantee that two states stay in lockstep forever.

A compact could try. Two partners could agree to pool their popular votes and allocate their electors together based on the combined result. But that brings back the NPVIC’s problems: a state could end up awarding electors against its own voters, the states would have to certify each other’s counts, and Congress would have more reason to insist on requiring it goes through an approval process. We think each state allocating its own electors from its own results is the simplest and most direct way to increase representation and participation.

The partnership itself also helps. Each compact pairs a state that leans red with one that leans blue, so the voters most likely to start showing up, Democrats in the red state and Republicans in the blue one, push in opposite directions. Large, unexpected swings toward newly engaged voters should tend to offset each other.

And if a state does shift in an unexpected way, that isn’t Fair Slate distorting the result. It shows the state was less polarized than it looked. Winner-take-all had been discouraging the voters on the losing side, and once that chilling effect is gone, the state’s real makeup shows through.

Remember, too, that under winner-take-all a slight change in turnout can flip a whole state, but under Fair Slate it moves a state’s electors only a little, in proportion to the voters who showed up. Even if a state’s turnout rose by half the gap between battleground states and the rest, and every new voter backed the same side, most states would shift by zero or one elector, and the largest by two. That keeps compacts stable. But because more states have electors in play, those small shifts add up, and new voters count in every Fair Slate state instead of only a few swing states.

It’s the least idealistic option on the table. Winner-take-all is set state by state, so there are only a few ways to change it:

• A constitutional amendment. Two-thirds of both houses of Congress to propose it, then three-quarters of the states, 38 of them, to ratify it.¹⁰
• The NPVIC. States holding 270 electors, which means at least 20 states plus DC, all joining and all staying in perpetually.¹⁵
• One state going it alone. It gives up electors and gets nothing back. That’s the most idealistic option.
• Nothing. Winner-take-all stays, and so do the millions of votes it leaves out.

Fair Slate asks for the least: two states, or a small group, trading like for like. Each side gets back what it gives up, the trigger protects it if a partner doesn’t follow through, and the agreement is enforceable. That isn’t blithely trusting the other side, it’s a deal. Incremental change may be a bit less flashy, but it's often easier to accomplish.

The system is already unfair. Winner-take-all leaves millions of voters with no electors in every state that uses it, so partial adoption doesn’t add unfairness, it removes some. States that don’t switch keep winner-take-all, but every state that does gives its voters real representation, and every balanced compact improves the system without tilting it toward either side.

We hope each switch makes the case for the next. Once voters can point to a state where both sides get electors, it gets harder to accept a system at home where nearly half of them get none.

Representation is messy, and the Constitution leaves it that way by giving this choice to each state.⁴ States will move at different speeds and for different reasons. That’s small, local government at work: your state’s voters and legislators deciding how your state is represented, with no national tally. Results may be a little less predictable. What’s guaranteed is that, in every state that switches, the electors reflect what its voters chose.

Only roughly. With 3 electors, most states split 2 to 1 whether the margin is modest or large, because each elector stands for a third of the state. It’s still far closer to the vote than 3 to 0, and a larger House would sharpen it.

They’d have reason to. A candidate could gain an elector in Texas or California, not just in a handful of swing states. How much campaigns would actually change is a prediction, and it depends on how many states take part.

The same people parties already nominate. Each party still names a full slate, and the state seats as many from the top of each list as that candidate earned. Rules for replacements and back-ups would remain as-is, just for a slate of limited size.