Report: Ford backs replacing Electoral College system in presidential elections

Nevada Gov.-elect Aaron Ford has said he supports a multistate effort to create a system that would prevent a candidate from winning the presidency without winning the popular vote.

The Democratic attorney general told KOLO-TV in Reno that he had not previously supported having Nevada join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which seeks the change, but changed his mind after further research.

“And looking at the Electoral College, understanding … frankly, the racist underpinnings of it in the first place, leads me to believe that we need to get rid of it. Not only for that reason, but because we’ve you know several times now, seeing the person who has won the popular vote not win because of the Electoral College,” he said in the KOLO interview broadcast this week. Ford did not elaborate further on the historical racial aspects of the current system.

Ford said in the interview that the current Electoral College system denied the presidency to candidates who won the national popular vote in past elections. In response to an inquiry from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a spokesperson for Ford confirmed his support for the concept of Nevada joining the compact but indicated it wasn’t a top priority.

“While the Governor-elect supports the national popular vote compact, his main focus is making life more affordable and putting money back into Nevadans’ pockets,” Ford spokesperson Tai Sims wrote in a statement. “There will be a time to talk about presidential elections, but right now Ford’s focus is lowering costs for working families.”

Proponents of the compact argue that every vote in a presidential race should carry equal weight. Critics counter that electing a president through a national popular vote would diminish the political power of less populous states like Nevada.

“If we eliminate the Electoral College, big cities across the country will determine who our president is, and those of us in small states will have no input,” Nevada Senate Minority Leader Robin Titus, a Northern Nevada Republican, told the Review-Journal.

“I think Democrats should oppose it, too,” she added. “It’s not a Democratic or Republican issue for me, it’s really about whether we’re a democracy and whether we’re a republic.”

Newly chosen Senate Majority Leader Edgar Flores, a Clark County Democrat, did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

What is the Electoral College?

At issue is the Electoral College, which is part of the U.S. Constitution and determines who is elected to the presidency. The Electoral College consists of 538 electors. Each state has as many electors as it has U.S. senators and representatives, and the District of Columbia has three. Nevada has six electoral votes.

Most states award all their electoral votes to the presidential ticket that receives the most votes statewide. Maine and Nebraska use a different allocation system. A candidate needs at least 270 electoral votes to win the presidency.

“Because of winner-take-all, presidential candidates only pay attention to voters in closely divided battleground states,” according to National Popular Vote, a nonprofit that advocates awarding the presidency to the national popular vote winner through an interstate compact.

The organization noted that five presidential elections have produced winners who lost the national popular vote. The two most recent were in 2000, when George W. Bush defeated Al Gore, and in 2016, when Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. Both winners were Republicans.

“Currently, every vote is not equal throughout the United States — for reasons including the formula for allocating electoral votes to the states, intra-decade population changes, and turnout differences that increase or decrease the value of a voter’s vote,” National Popular Vote says.

Nevada state Sen. Carrie Buck agreed with Titus, adding that the Electoral College should stay in place.

“How do we compete for Nevada’s agenda when our total population is 3.3 million compared to California’s 39.5 million?” she told the Review-Journal in a text message. “Why would the Governor-elect want to lose Nevada’s leverage?”

Previous Nevada efforts failed

To advance, the compact must recruit enough states to account for a combined 270 electoral votes. Eighteen states and the District of Columbia have already passed bills to join the pact, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, bringing the compact’s current total to 222 electoral votes.

The recent blue wave that gave Democrats control of the governorship and both legislative chambers in additional states put the proposal within reach, though success at reaching the needed 270 electoral votes is likely to prompt legal challenges to the compact itself.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Wisconsin Gov.-elect David Crowley recently indicated that they would support replacing the Electoral College. If those states vote to join the pact, reaching the 270 threshold would require Michigan and either Arizona or Nevada to join, according to The Associated Press.

Past Nevada attempts to join the compact have floundered.

Democratic majorities passed Assembly Bill 186 in 2019, but it was vetoed by then-Gov. Steve Sisolak, a Democrat. Several Assembly members in his party voted against it.

In his veto message, Sisolak wrote that the pact “could diminish the role of smaller states like Nevada in national electoral contests and force Nevada’s electors to side with whoever wins the nationwide popular vote, rather than the candidate Nevadans choose.”

Democrats tried again in 2023, this time proposing a constitutional amendment that would need legislative approval in two consecutive sessions before going to voters. The proposal passed in 2023 but died without a vote in 2025, while Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo was in office.

It was unclear Thursday whether Democrats are planning to introduce a bill for the 2027 Legislature.

Contact Ricardo Torres-Cortez at [email protected].