“Imagine the following scenario: you’ve got a national election within 100,000 votes. That happened in 1968,” McConnell said.

The national popular vote would give “every precinct in America the incentive to have a recount so that recounts are going on in 50 states … When the national popular vote total is the way the president is chosen, then every vote in America in every precinct in America would become the subject for endless litigation. There wouldn’t be a chance the presidency would be resolved by Jan. 20 in time for swearing in.”

This would, McConnell said, be “a catastrophic outcome” and “a constitutional crisis” that “brings this country to its knees. We’ve never had a situation where the president wasn’t sworn in by the date specified in the Constitution.”