Last week the state legislature of Maine became the 17th in the nation to pass a bill

which will effectively eliminate the electoral college because you see unbeknownst to

most people there is a serious effort in this country to make presidential elections a simple majority popular vote.

And even though most people have never heard about this effort, well, it's actually already 76% complete, meaning that the

Electoral College is truly at risk of getting completely scrapped in the next few years.

This effort, it's officially called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, otherwise known as the NPVIC.

And what it basically is, it's an agreement between the states that join to give their collective electoral votes to whichever

candidate happens to win the popular vote at the national level.

Let me briefly explain. Up in your screen is a map of the electoral college votes by state. This is the most recent

map based on the 2020 census results. Every state has electoral college votes equal to the number of representatives

that they have in Congress at the federal level.

And so for instance, the state of Texas, they have two senators,

as well as 38 members of the house and therefore they have 40 votes

total in the Electoral College.

Now the way that the Electoral College has evolved over the last 250 years is kind of a

long story but relevant to our discussion today it's

worth highlighting that every individual state gets to decide how they

apportion their votes meaning that the state legislatures in each state they get to decide how they divvy out their electoral college votes.

And so, at this moment, the way that it works in practice is that whichever candidate wins a plurality of votes in a given state, meaning whoever wins the popular vote in a state,

they get that state's electoral college votes.

This is the way it works for every state except for two.

Nebraska and Maine, they actually split up their electoral college votes based on congressional districts.

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