Amendment XIV, Section 2
Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
If a state's electoral votes are effectively chosen by voters from other states, then the voting power of the citizens of that state have been severely diluted, or "abridged" according to Amendment XIV. Thus, their representation in the House will be reduced to a very small fraction of what it was originally. For example, a state with a voting population of 13 million, representing 5% of a national voting population of 260 milion will have their number of representatives reduced to 5% of what it is currently since the voting power of its voters have now been reduced to 5% of what it once was.
I hate to see Oklahoma go this route, but I would love to see California do it.
There is no reality to the statements:
“Any state which binds its electors to the national popular vote will in effect forfeit all its electoral votes in the next election as well as forfeit all of its seats in the House of Representatives.”
“. . .their representation in the House will be reduced to a very small fraction of what it was originally”
There would not be repercussions for States awarding their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner. None of their representation in the House would be effected.
National Popular Vote does not prevent the rights of anyone to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States. Under National Popular Vote, every vote, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in every presidential election. Every vote would be included in the state counts and national count. The Presidency is guaranteed, by at least the 270 electoral votes of the enacting states, to the candidate getting the most popular votes in the entire United States.
The Founding Fathers in the Constitution did not require states to allow their citizens to vote for president, much less award all their electoral votes based upon the vote of their citizens.
Unable to agree on any particular method for selecting presidential electors, the Founding Fathers in the Constitution left the choice of method exclusively to the states. The constitutional wording does not encourage, discourage, require, or prohibit the use of any particular method for awarding the state’s electoral votes. A state could decide to award its electoral votes to the tallest candidate.
“The bottom line is that the electors from those states who cast their ballot for the nationwide vote winner are completely accountable (to the extent that independent agents are ever accountable to anyone) to the people of those states. The NPV states aren’t delegating their Electoral College votes to voters outside the state; they have made a policy choice about the substantive intelligible criteria (i.e., national popularity) that they want to use to make their selection of electors. There is nothing in Article II (or elsewhere in the Constitution) that prevents them from making the decision that, in the Twenty-First Century, national voter popularity is a (or perhaps the) crucial factor in worthiness for the office of the President.” - Vikram David Amar