Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger has, since her election as a “moderate” Democrat last fall, quickly proved that she’s neither a moderate nor even remotely intelligent. If she were, she’d never have agreed to sign Virginia onto the left’s unconstitutional scheme to bypass the Electoral College.

With Spanberger’s signature this week, Virginia became the 18th state to join the “National Popular Vote Compact.” States that do so agree that, regardless of how their state votes for president, their Electoral College votes will go to the winner of the national popular vote.

If states adding up to 270 electoral votes join the compact, the Electoral College would effectively be moot, since 270 is what’s needed to declare a winner in a presidential election. With Virginia on board, the compact is now just 48 electoral votes shy of its goal.

“This is on the 5-yard line of making this a reality,” Alyssa Cass, a “strategist for the National Popular Vote Project and a Democratic consultant,” told NPR.

But even if proponents of this scheme manage to get the requisite number of states to sign up, it will never become a reality and, if it did, would wreak utter havoc with presidential elections.

The first hurdle is that as soon as the NPVC went into effect, it would face innumerable challenges that would eventually land it before the Supreme Court, where its fate is all but certain.

Not a few legal scholars have looked at this scheme and concluded that it’s blatantly unconstitutional.

“This constitutes a violation of the Compact Clause, which states that ‘No State shall, without the Consent of Congress … enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State,’” is how a Princeton Legal Review article put it.

An article in the Harvard Law Journal concluded that “the Compact is unconstitutional because it promotes combination among the states and effectively creates a direct popular election. Because these results are precisely what the Framers deliberately sought to avoid when they carefully detailed the ‘finely wrought’ electoral procedures in Article II, Section 1, the Compact makes an impermissible fundamental alteration to the Electoral College.”

A Publius article says that, assuming the Supreme Court rules that the compact requires congressional approval before it could go into effect, “constitutional restrictions upon Congress’s power regarding the states’ appointment of electors prohibit Congress from approving this compact.”

Still, let’s imagine that Democrats were able to overcome these constitutional obstacles by, say, packing the Supreme Court with half a dozen more Ketanji Brown Jacksons.

The result would be a treatment far worse than the supposed disease.

Willamette University law professor Norman Williams, writing in the Harvard Law Review, explains that “The flaws in the NPVC are numerous … with far greater consequences for the legitimacy of our presidential elections than what the nation witnessed in Bush v. Gore.”

Flaws such as: How would a nationwide recount be ordered or conducted if the national popular vote is close?

If you don’t think this could happen, you don’t know your history.

In 1960, JFK defeated Richard Nixon by a razor-thin margin of fewer than 113,000 votes. James A. Garfield beat Winfield Scott Hancock in 1880 by less than 1,900 votes. Grover Cleveland’s 1884 margin was less than 58,000 votes.

Since one state can’t order another state to recount its votes, Williams asks, “would not the absence of a uniform, nationwide recount call into question the legitimacy of the president so elected?”

And, what’s to keep a state from dropping out of the compact if its voters don’t like the national popular vote outcome? Would California or Massachusetts electors actually agree to elect a conservative Republican who won the national popular vote? They would have had to in 2024.

The NPVC tries to avoid this by “forbidding” states from withdrawing from the compact after July 20 in a presidential election year. But as Williams points out, “that limitation is unenforceable both as a legal and practical matter.”

The truth is that the Electoral College was a genius idea of the founders, which preserves federalism, helps protect against widespread voter fraud, and shields us from mob rule. (The Heritage Foundation has a good primer on the “Essential Electoral College” that is worth reading.)

Even those who support a national popular vote say the only legitimate way to make that happen is with a constitutional amendment, not an unconstitutional end run.

But since when has the left ever let the Constitution stand in its way?

‚— Written by the I&I Editorial Board