Wouldn’t NPV change a system “given to us by the Founding Fathers”?
The Founding Fathers did not design the system of allocating electoral votes currently used in most states. Rather, they established the Electoral College without any instructions on how states should use it. In the first Presidential election in 1789, only five states allowed citizens to vote for the president in any form. In 1800, when Thomas Jefferson won our fourth presidential election, only two states allocated electoral votes based on the now-dominant winner-take-all unit rule in which all electoral votes went to the candidate winning the statewide popular vote. Adoption of the unit rule in the following decades was driven by partisan motives. The unit rule helped each state’s majority party by maximizing support for that state’s favored candidate. Once enough states adopted the unit rule, any state using another method risked hurting its favored presidential candidate. If states controlled by one party used the unit rule and states controlled by another party allocated electora
