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The National Popular Vote Compact raises serious constitutional questions under the Compact Clause and could allow a small group of compact-state legislatures to override election results in non-compact states. That's not reform; it's a constitutional crisis written in advance.
The Electoral College forces candidates to assemble broad geographic coalitions. A national popular vote would concentrate the entire election in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston, allowing candidates to ignore the 40 states they can't run up the score in — the opposite of the representation problem reformers claim to solve.
The Electoral College was designed partly to give slave states outsized influence by counting enslaved people as 3/5 of a person toward electoral votes. The winner-take-all allocation used by 48 states has no constitutional basis and was not intended by the founders — it was adopted state by state as a partisan strategy.
The concentration of presidential campaigns in 5-7 swing states means the remaining 40+ states are effectively ignored. Policies, spending, and candidate attention flow to Pennsylvania and Arizona while Texas and California voters are taken for granted. A national popular vote would make every vote equally worth competing for.
The 2000 and 2016 outcomes that offend reform advocates were legitimate under the rules both candidates competed under. Changing electoral rules in response to a disliked outcome is corrosive to the democratic norm that you play by the rules even when you lose — and signals that the rules should change whenever one side prevails.
Every other major democracy with a directly elected executive uses a national popular vote. The US could adopt ranked-choice voting to handle third-party spoiler dynamics while achieving genuine majority legitimacy. The American system is the global outlier, not the model.
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