There ought to be a special U.S. flag for use in Presidential election years. Forget those fifty stars, all crowed into a corner like swine in a feedlot. Three rows, three big stars per row. There, that’s the ticket.

A front-page story in Friday’s Times inadvertently summarized the No. 1 argument for the National Popular Vote compact. Here’s the top:

9 Swing States Are Main Focus Of An Ad Blitz By JEREMY W. PETERS HENDERSON, Nev. — The presidential campaigns and their allies are zeroing in mainly on nine swing states, bombarding them with commercials in the earliest concentration of advertising in modern politics. With so many resources focused on persuading an ever-shrinking pool of swing voters like those here in Nevada, the 2012 election is likely to go down in history as the one in which the most money was spent reaching the fewest people.

Nine states. They get to decide it all. Nine all-powerful entities—sort of like the New York Yankees. Or the Supreme Court, the only part of our so-called government that gets to rule by decree.

The No. 2 argument for N.P.V., by the way, is that the current setup can put someone in the White House who is the choice of fewer actual American individuals than someone else. But that horrible situation happens rarely, which is why the “wrong winner” argument is only No. 2. The horrible situation to which the Times alludes—the de facto political sterilization of more than three quarters of the electorate—happens every time. And this time it’s worse than ever:

In the spring of 2000, George W. Bush and Al Gore fought an air war in close to 20 states. In early 2004, there were the “Swing Seventeen.” And in 2008, the Obama campaign included 18 states in its June advertising offensive, its first of the general election.

Now it’s down to nine.

If you live in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, or Virginia, congratulations. You’re part of the United States of Battleground America, a country with a population smaller than Iran’s. Yes, you’ll have to put up with a lot of obnoxious TV commercials for the next five months. But you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that your vote and your neighbors’ votes will be worth soliciting and worth casting. And if you want to participate—if you want to do something (ring doorbells, pass out leaflets, host a coffee klatch)—you won’t have to travel to some distant “swing” state.

But if you live in deep-blue New York or Rhode Island or California, or dark-red Texas or Wyoming or Mississippi, or another of the forty-one states that aren’t into swinging, then you’d better be the kind of person who just likes to watch.

If you want to do, you can export some of your spare cash to a campaign committee or Super PAC, which will spend it in a state worth spending money in. And that’ll be about it for you, participation-wise. Really, you might as well be nothin’ but a damn foreigner—maybe one of those illegal immigrants some people seem so scared of. You’re back in the U.S.S.A.—the United States of Spectator America.

(For newbies: the National Popular Vote, or N.P.V., is a breakthrough plan that will enable us to elect the President not by by collating the packaged “votes” of collective entities called states, but by counting the votes of individual citizens no matter where they live. N.P.V. does this without changing the constitution or abolishing the electoral college. The plan is halfway to coming into effect, which will happen when states possessing the requisite total of two hundred and seventy “electoral votes” approve it—not in time for this year’s election, obviously, but possibly in time for 2016. You should check it out, which you can do here, here, and here.