Only four times in our nation's entire history, out of 56 presidential elections to date, (1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000) has the winner of the Electoral College not also been the winner of the nationwide popular vote.

Since the 1912 presidential election, the first one after the size of the House of Representatives was capped at 435 members, the average margin of victory in the Electoral College has been around 273.52 electoral votes . . . and only five (1916, 1960, 1976, 2000, and 2004) were close enough that they could have "gone the other way" by shifting just one state from the electoral winner to the electoral runner-up.

During that same timeframe (1912 to present), the average margin of the nationwide popular vote was 6,554,061.40 votes (11.77% of the total votes cast).  The presidential elections of 1916, 1948, 1960, 1968, 1976, 2000, and 2004 all had a nationwide popular vote margin of less than five percent (3.35%, 4.52%, 0.17%, 1.12%, 2.10%, 0.53%, and 2.49% respectively).

Ships are designed with the concept of compartmentalization in mind.  Compartmentalization means that any damage to any part of the ship is isolated to the damaged area; the ship continues to function and fight unless and until a catastrophic level of damage is created.

Thus, because of the interstate compartmentalization provided by the Electoral College, Bush v. Gore stayed confined to Florida and did not affect the outcome in the other 49 states.  Likewise, the fact that, in the 2008 election, Missouri's results were so close that they didn't report the winner until two weeks later (it ultimately went to McCain by a 0.14% margin) didn't affect the rest of the election.

The NPVIC does away with this compartmentalization feature, and thus any problems will be amplified nationwide by the fact that the popular vote, not the electoral vote, is the ultimate decider.

Any candidate who yielded, for example, the 16% of Americans who live in rural areas in favor of a "big city" approach would not likely win the national popular vote.

If big cities controlled the outcome of elections, the governors and U.S. Senators would be Democratic in virtually every state with a significant city.

A nationwide presidential campaign, with every vote equal, would be run the way presidential candidates campaign to win the electoral votes of closely divided battleground states, such as Ohio and Florida, under the state-by-state winner-take-all methods. The big cities in those battleground states do not receive all the attention, much less control the outcome. Cleveland and Miami do not receive all the attention or control the outcome in Ohio and Florida.

The itineraries of presidential candidates in battleground states (and their allocation of other campaign resources in battleground states) reflect the political reality that every gubernatorial or senatorial candidate knows. When and where every vote is equal, a campaign must be run everywhere.

Even in California state-wide elections, candidates for governor or U.S. Senate don't campaign just in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and those places don't control the outcome (otherwise California wouldn't have recently had Republican governors Reagan, Dukemejian, Wilson, and Schwarzenegger).   A vote in rural Alpine county is just an important as a vote in Los Angeles.   If Los Angeles cannot control statewide elections in California, it can hardly control a nationwide election.

In fact, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland together cannot control a statewide election in California.

Similarly, Republicans dominate Texas politics without carrying big cities such as Dallas and Houston.

There are numerous other examples of Republicans who won races for governor and U.S. Senator in other states that have big cities (e.g., New York, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts) without ever carrying the big cities of their respective states.

The National Popular Vote bill would not change the need for candidates to build a winning coalition across demographics. Any candidate who yielded, for example, the 16% of Americans who live in rural areas in favor of a "big city" approach would not likely win the national popular vote. Candidates would still have to appeal to a broad range of demographics, and perhaps even more so, because the election wouldn't be capable of coming down to just one demographic, such as voters in Ohio.

Supporters  of National Popular Vote find it hard to believe the Founding Fathers would endorse an electoral system where 2/3rds of the states and voters now are completely politically irrelevant.  9 of the original 13 states are ignored now. Presidential campaigns spend 98% of their resources in just 15 battleground states, where they aren't hopelessly behind or safely ahead, and can win the bare plurality of the vote to win all of the state's electoral votes. Now the majority of Americans, in rural, small, medium-small, average, and large states are ignored. Virtually none of the small states receive any attention.

National Popular Vote would limit the benefits to be gained by fraud. One fraudulent vote would only win one vote in the return. In the current electoral system, one fraudulent vote could mean 55 electoral votes, or just enough electoral votes to win the presidency without having the most popular votes in the country.

Hendrik Hertzberg wrote: "To steal the closest popular-vote election in American history, you'd have to steal more than a hundred thousand votes . . .To steal the closest electoral-vote election in American history, you'd have to steal around 500 votes, all in one state. . . .

For a national popular vote election to be as easy to switch as 2000, it would have to be two hundred times closer than the 1960 election--and, in popular-vote terms, forty times closer than 2000 itself.

The possibility of recounts should not even be a consideration in debating the merits of a national popular vote. No one has ever suggested that the possibility of a recount constitutes a valid reason why state governors or U.S. Senators, for example, should not be elected by a popular vote.

The question of recounts comes to mind in connection with presidential elections only because the current system so frequently creates artificial crises and unnecessary disputes.

A nationwide recount would not happen. We do and would vote state by state. Each state manages its own election and recount. The state-by-state winner-take-all system is not a firewall, but instead causes unnecessary fires.

Given that there is a recount only once in about 160 statewide elections, and given there is a presidential election once every four years, one would expect a recount about once in 640 years with the National Popular Vote. The actual probability of a close national election would be even less than that because recounts are less likely with larger pools of votes.

The average change in the margin of victory as a result of a statewide recount was a mere 296 votes in a 10-year study of 2,884 elections.

No recount would have been warranted in any of the nation's 56 previous presidential elections if the outcome had been based on the nationwide count.