Can the Electoral College be abolished? About the push for a national popular vote

Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz branched out from Kamala Harris' campaign's position Tuesday when he called for the end of the Electoral College.

"I think all of us know, the Electoral College needs to go. We need a national popular vote," he said at a California fundraiser. A campaign official denied that is part of Harris' platform.

There have been more than 700 federal proposals to change or abolish the Electoral College in U.S. history, according to the University of California at Berkeley. The most recent push to move away from the Electoral College is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which has been agreed on by 17 states and the District of Columbia.

But getting the remaining states to drop the Electoral College system in favor of the popular vote may be prohibitively difficult, as it would require buy-in from states that benefit from the system.

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How often have the election results differed from the popular vote?

Supporters of the Electoral College argue the system forces campaigns to pay attention to voters in areas that would otherwise be ignored under a popular vote system. But critics counter that the Electoral College system has boiled elections down to only a handful of swing states, making voters in solidly blue or red states obsolete.

Throughout American history, five presidents have lost the popular vote but won the election, according to Ballotpedia.

Two of those instances have worked against the Democrats in modern history: In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote; In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. The other instances were in the 19th century.

What would it take to abolish the Electoral College?

The Electoral College could be abolished by way of a constitutional amendment, which would require support from two-thirds of the House and Senate and ratification from three-fourths of states, making it a long shot.

An alternative could be through the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which started in the mid-2000s in an effort to override the Electoral College. The compact requires states that sign the agreement to pass laws awarding its electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the national popular vote. Under the plan, the compact is not activated until enough states have joined to total 270 electoral votes.

Map: What states have signed the National Popular Voter Interstate Compact?

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, every state has considered a National Popular Vote bill, but 18 districts constituting 209 electoral votes have passed them into law.

Why it may be hard to get 61 more votes to enact the NPV compact

So far, all states that have agreed to this arrangement have been Democratic-leaning states. This is unsurprising given how the Electoral College system has favored Republican presidents who lost the popular vote.

The Electoral College also disproportionally represents smaller states. The number of electoral votes a state receives is equal to the number of senators and representatives a state has. All states except for Maine and Nebraska use a winner-takes-all approach, allocating all of their electoral votes to the candidate that won the most votes in their state. This means that the majority of attention is placed on swing states in presidential elections. Plus, since every state gets two senators regardless of the population size, those two Electoral College votes have more weight from smaller states.

According to the Pew Research Center, a majority of Americans would prefer to use a popular vote system, though the margin is greater among Democrats.

But as Berkley points out, it will be harder to convince smaller red or swing states to give up their standing in the election.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Electoral College reform effort: National Popular Vote Interstate Compact