Vice President Mike Pence presides over a joint session of Congress to count electoral votes for president on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2020.

Maine has become the newest state to adopt a controversial scheme that would give the presidency to the winner of each election's "National Popular Vote" and would, in effect, potentially permanently cancel any decision the state's own voters might make.

A report from ABC News revealed Gov. Janet Mills allowed the legislative plan to become law without her signature.

It joins Maine to a controversial idea that would give all of its Electoral College votes to the winner of that national vote, thus turning over ultimate presidential election power to 12 states: California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, New Jersey and Virginia.

Of course, there could be defectors among that group, but when voters in those states alone picked the same candidate for president, no other state's voters would count. At all.

The plan purports to create a compact among the states that would let the "majority" of voters pick a president.

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The constitutional system, set up to let individual states run elections, allocates one Electoral College vote to states for each member of Congress, distributing the influence proportionately.

Currently the candidate that gets 270 electoral votes is the winner.

The 12 states' electoral votes total 281.

The Electoral College was designed to assure that even smaller states could have an influence on an election, and it sets up the system to rely on the integrity and authority of the states.

But the new system would have handed America a President Al Gore and a President Hillary Clinton, and all of the impacts they would have created, and leftists long have blasted the Electoral College as giving individual states too much power.

The decision in Maine means it is joining 16 other states and Washington, D.C., in the plan, which already has pledged 209 electoral votes.

The plan remains controversial as the method for choosing a president is specified in the Constitution. Proponents of the new idea say they don't need a constitutional amendment, which would be nearly impossible to obtain, because it's just an agreement among states to allocate their Electoral College votes in ways they are allowed.

A court challenge would appear to be inevitable should the coalition ever amass the 270 total.

ABC documented five of the 46 presidents who were inaugurated lost the popular vote, including Donald Trump in 2016.

Promoters say that under the present system, a small number of "swing states" decides the presidency.

"In 2020, if 21,461 voters had changed their minds, Joe Biden would have been defeated, despite leading by over 7 million votes nationally. Each of these 21,461 voters (5,229 in Arizona, 5,890 in Georgia, and 10,342 in Wisconsin) was 329 times more important than the 7 million voters elsewhere," the compact promoters charge.

ABC reported Darrell West, of the Brookings Institute, explained, "If you look at all the presidential elections from 1992 through 2020, Republicans have won the presidential popular vote only once -- and that was in 2004 when [George W.] Bush beat John Kerry in the popular vote. In every other election over the last 30 years, Democrats have won the popular vote, but because of the Electoral College, Republicans have gotten the presidency a couple of times despite losing the popular vote."

Derek Muller, of Notre Dame Law, said the dispute undoubtedly will end up in court unless Congress actually acts.

The last major change in elections was a century ago, when states changed from having their legislatures pick senators to having direct elections. That required a constitutional amendment.

WND reported several years ago that the movement has been making short advances periodically.

At that time, the Democrat governor in Colorado, Jared Polis, signed that state onto the program.

The late Phyllis Schlafly wrote several years earlier about the plan.

"The NPV slogan 'Every Vote Equal' is dishonest because the NPV proposal is based on legalizing vote-stealing. For example, Texas or Louisiana could be forced to cast … votes for a candidate who won more votes in other states, such as New York," she explained at the time.

A lawsuit on the fight is not likely to decide anything ahead of time because federal courts review only actual disputes, not the prospect of what would happen.

And a lawsuit immediately after an election decided on the new scheme could throw the nation into complete turmoil, without a defined winner.

The Constitution does forbid states from entering into compacts with other states without congressional approval.

The program isn't without headwinds. Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak, a Democrat, vetoed the plan when it was proposed in his state.

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