222 Votes Away, and a Record Few Can Get End to End

An agreement among American states already holds 222 of the 270 electoral votes it would need to award the presidency to whoever wins the national popular vote. That’s 48 votes short, as of August 2026. Eighteen states plus the District of Columbia have enacted it, most recently Virginia, where Governor Abigail Spanberger signed it on April 13, 2026. Most people know about the Electoral College and its 270-vote threshold. Far fewer know this agreement exists.

It’s called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, and it works entirely inside a power the Constitution already gives each state: the authority to decide how it appoints its own electors. Join the compact, and a state agrees to appoint its electors for whoever wins the national popular vote, once enough other states have joined to reach 270. It needs no constitutional amendment. One legal question is still open: does Congress have to consent to an interstate agreement like this one under the Constitution’s Compact Clause? The Congressional Research Service has examined it and left it unresolved.

Whether it should take effect is a more interesting question, and one I can’t answer here. I’d rather put the record it turns on within reach of anyone who wants to dig into it, and leave the question itself to you: how should this country choose a president?

The argument over the compact runs on two centuries of election data that, as best I can tell, nobody has assembled publicly, for free, in one place a machine can read. I mean a source a dashboard, a notebook, or a piece of software can put a direct question to, without anyone first downloading a spreadsheet and wrangling it.

The record the argument runs on top of

The National Archives keeps the Electoral College result for every presidential election, back to 1789. Election researchers keep the popular vote separately, in sources with their own coverage and their own conventions. Those two records were never built to sit next to each other. Comparing “who won the Electoral College” against “who won the popular vote” for any given year means someone has to take two documents built for different purposes and line them up state by state, candidate by candidate, year by year. As far as I’ve been able to find, a cleanly joined electoral-and-popular-vote dataset on one shared model, running back to 1824, doesn’t already exist as a public resource. That gap is what this project fills, and the joined record is meant to be useful in its own right, whatever anyone argues from it about NPVIC.

Five times in 47 presidencies, the person who took office had not led the national popular vote count: John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, George W. Bush in 2000, Donald Trump in 2016. 1824 is the odd one. No candidate held a majority of the electors appointed, so the House chose Adams under the Twelfth Amendment, a different mechanism than the other four, which are the more familiar shape: Electoral College winner, popular-vote runner-up. Whatever conclusion a reader draws about NPVIC has to hold up against each of those five cases on its own terms.

What’s public today stops at two different points. The Electoral College half of that record is public back to 1824: all 51 elections, state by state, checkable against a live API, down to the difference between the electoral votes that were cast and the ones Congress actually counted in the years those two numbers diverge. The popular-vote half reaches back only to 1976. That boundary comes from licensing: the returns exist much further back, but the source I’m free to redistribute, the MIT Election Lab, starts there.

So the comparison lands unevenly on the five cases above. For 2000 and 2016, both halves of it are checkable end to end. For 1824, 1876, and 1888, the electoral result is there (ask about 1888 and you get Harrison 233, Cleveland 168, out of 401), and the popular-vote half of the claim is not. It exists, in the project’s own warehouse, from the source I’m not free to republish; it just isn’t something I can hand you. Both windows are published on every response that carries data, at meta.provenance.coverage, so you don’t have to take my word for where they stop. And every state row carries a status saying whether a popular vote was held there at all, which is what turns 1824’s six legislature-appointed states from a caveat I’m asking you to accept into a fact you can look up.

Why 1824, and not a tidier year

The election of 1824 is also where the comparison has to start. Setting the Electoral College result beside the popular vote needs two things at once: enough states holding a popular vote for the total to mean anything, and a contest close enough that the two records might disagree. 1824 is the first year both are true. Eighteen of its twenty-four states chose electors at the ballot box, and the race was genuinely open: four candidates took electoral votes, and the leader finished with 99 of 261. Four years earlier, Monroe had taken all but one of the electoral votes cast; when the two records agree that completely, lining them up doesn’t say much.

All of which makes 1824 the messiest year in the set, and a cleaner starting point does exist a few cycles later, once every state runs a popular vote and the Electoral College winner simply takes office. But the tidy years are tidy because of what happened in the untidy ones, and a record that begins after the mess can’t show you that.

What makes it worth building an argument on

The record isn’t complete, and two centuries of American elections were never going to be documented the way a modern one is. The test for building an argument on it is whether it is honest about the difference between we don’t know and the answer is zero. A state that held no popular vote at all is not the same fact as a state that held one in which a candidate got zero votes. Collapse those two into the same number and you’ve asserted something about American history that isn’t true.

The next post in this series takes that distinction on directly. A record has to be able to say which of the two happened before anyone can draw a conclusion from it, about NPVIC or anything else.

---

Drafted with Claude Code. The ideas, claims, and any errors are mine.