Brandon Watson explains why the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact—in which states assign their votes in the electoral college to whoever wins the most votes countrywide—is sheer madhattery:
The National Popular Vote idea . . . is not a national popular vote. It is, in fact, just a form of the Electoral College system in which state election laws have gone insane. On the NPV system, states would be committing themselves in the Electoral College to preferring votes elsewhere to those cast by their own citizens. If State A doesn’t allow felons to vote and State B does for civil rights reasons, then on the NPV plan, State A is committed to accepting as legitimate felons voting in in State B despite the fact that people in A exactly like those in B don’t get to vote, and State B is committed to accepting as legitimate the election numbers coming out of State A, despite knowing quite well that the numbers are derived in part on what people in State B regard as a civil rights violation, and that there are potential voters in A whose votes are not getting counted despite the fact that they would count in B. This is an absurd situation.
Moreover, NPV guarantees that states with well-thought-out election laws and well-run election systems are held hostage to those without. When, for instance, we had the problems with the Bush v. Gore election, the problems were all with the popular vote count of Florida. It only affected the Electoral College because Florida’s own method of determining Electors is tied to its own popular vote count. Numbers can’t be established for a ‘national popular vote’ (even one based on a fiction) under a state-by-state system like ours unless all the states have their act together. We know for a fact that this can’t be guaranteed, and that a state can make a complete mess of things by poor collection methods, inconsistent vote-counting, and loopholes for voting fraud. And we also know for a fact that nobody can actually fix these problems except citizens of that state.
The NPVIC proposal has already been adopted by Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois, Hawaii, Washington, Massachusetts, Vermont, and California. If Romney wins the popular vote today but loses the electoral college, you could see a great number of red states join that Democratic-leaning list.
November 6th, 2012 | 3:07 pm
This has got to be one of the stupidest ideas ever proposed in American government and politics. I think there is a lot to be said for the Electoral College, even if occasionally there is a president elected who loses the popular vote. But if any change is made to have the president selected by popular vote, it should be made to the Constitution.
November 7th, 2012 | 1:10 am
If anything, each state should divide their electoral votes by congressional district. It doesn’t make a state defer their votes to states with massive corruption, as the proposal in this article would do, and it allows the people trapped in certain regions of states like California or in the northeast to get their voice heard in the national vote. As it is now, the vast majority of geographical space in the country is being made subject to a concentrated urban block on either coast.
November 7th, 2012 | 8:52 am
I am thankful that voting still relies on the voices of people as opposed to how much land one controls. Geography is not people.
November 7th, 2012 | 11:28 am
The system we have, OUR Federal system, is counter-majoritarian in aim AND design. There are about 50 good reasons for doing that that have NOT gone away since 1787 and have in fact increased since then: the several States. The United States, as should be evident in its very name, is a union of States. We have in place a deliberate system of dual sovereignties.
Matters did not have to fall out that way. By the time of the Constitutional Convention, Framers such as Madison and Mason and Sherman had the examples of Britain and France to contemplate, both monarchies and neither fully consolidated before the end of the 17th Century and only after a long struggle with Feudalism, a peculiar system so removed from our experience as to make it very difficult to understand but which was based on the recognition of exchange of rights between between lord and liege. Yet in England, the boroughs and baronies, the counties and marches and dukedoms of William III’s kingdom after the “Glorious Revolution” retained from the feudal era significant powers in Parliament adverse to that of the monarch, and especially as compared with the like arrangements in Louis XIV’s France, such as the provinces, then, as now, largely administrative districts with only ceremonial authority and adhering strictly to the ancient (Roman) guide to jurisprudence: Quod principi placuit, legis vigorem habet [Ulpian], i.e., “Law is whatever pleases a prince.” Between 1614 and 1789, for example, the Estates-General, the French national “Parlement,” did not convened even once.
Centralization and homogenization of power have been the rule in France, arguably, since Charlemagne (c. Ninth Century). The countercurrent of a meaningful, namely, un-infringeable local check on a central authority such as a monarch is characteristic of the British Isles as it is nowhere else on earth. Tom Paine, in Common Sense, argues that the phenomenon had something to do with Anglo-Saxon irredentism regarding the Norman conquest of England of the Eleventh Century. I could not say if he is right, but it is in that soil that our Constitution has its roots.
It doesn’t much matter whether the fact that our political system is English is congenial to anyone or not. There are powers, critically important ones, too, that are both lawful and laudable and that do not depend for approbation, legally or philosophically speaking, on majorities. One of them is the plain fact that the representatives of Rhode Island exercise as much weight through their opinions as do those from California in the Senate of the United States (though NOT in the Electoral College), something more to be celebrated, I think, than deplored. Montesquieu, whom all of the Framers seem to have revered, spoke of the “spirit of the laws.” Well, Federalism and its counter-majoritarian logic is integral to the spirit of our laws and may no more be harmlessly tampered with than may a man’s heart or lungs.
To attack the Electoral College is most definitely NOT—as many demagogues would have us believe—to attack a relic bequeathed to us by 18th Century aristocrats; or, rather, it is not simply that. It is an attack founded in historical ignorance on the very PRACTICAL reasons for the existence of our Constitution as opposed to another, which were (and are) neither trivial nor entirely contingent. The American republic was founded because States far from homogenous culturally opposed the rationalizing encroachments of the British crown. The “United States” emerged only latterly.
Culture trumps politics, in my opinion. That fact is essential, not trivial, in understanding our political system and certainly does NOT mean that we are condemned to political balkanization. We are LESS culturally homogenous, I suspect, in 2012 than we were 225 years ago when 95% of the European population traced its ancestry to two islands off the northwest coast of Europe. Shall we pretend otherwise in our politics?
November 7th, 2012 | 4:45 pm
With the Electoral College and federalism, the Founding Fathers meant to empower the states to pursue their own interests within the confines of the Constitution. The National Popular Vote is an exercise of that power, not an attack upon it.
The Electoral College is now the set of dedicated party activists who vote as rubberstamps for their party’s presidential candidate. That is not what the Founders intended.
The current state-by-state winner-take-all method of awarding electoral votes (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but since enacted by 48 states), under which all of a state’s electoral votes are awarded to the candidate who gets the most votes in each separate state, ensures that the candidates, after the conventions, in 2012 will not reach out to about 80% of the states and their voters. Candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, campaign, or care about the voter concerns in the dozens of states where they are safely ahead or hopelessly behind.
80% of the states and people have been just spectators to the presidential elections. That’s more than 85 million voters, 200 million Americans.
Policies important to the citizens of ‘flyover’ states are not as highly prioritized as policies important to ‘battleground’ states when it comes to governing.
Since World War II, a shift of a few thousand votes in one or two states would have elected the second-place candidate in 4 of the 13 presidential elections
The National Popular Vote bill preserves the Electoral College and state control of elections. It changes the way electoral votes are awarded in the Electoral College.
Under National Popular Vote, every vote, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in every presidential election. Every vote would be included in the state counts and national count. The candidate with the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC would get the 270+ electoral votes from the enacting states. That majority of electoral votes guarantees the candidate with the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC wins the presidency.
National Popular Vote would give a voice to the minority party voters in each state. Now their votes are counted only for the candidate they did not vote for. Now they don’t matter to their candidate.
And now votes, beyond the one needed to get the most votes in the state, for winning in a state are wasted and don’t matter to candidates. Utah (5 electoral votes) alone generated a margin of 385,000 “wasted” votes for Bush in 2004. 8 small western states, with less than a third of California’s population, provided Bush with a bigger margin (1,283,076) than California provided Kerry (1,235,659).
States have the responsibility and power to make all of their voters relevant in every presidential election and beyond.
Unable to agree on any particular method, the Founding Fathers left the choice of method for selecting presidential electors exclusively to the states by adopting the language contained in section 1 of Article II of the U.S. Constitution– “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors . . .” The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly characterized the authority of the state legislatures over the manner of awarding their electoral votes as “plenary” and “exclusive.”
Federalism concerns the allocation of power between state governments and the national government. The National Popular Vote bill concerns how votes are tallied, not how much power state governments possess relative to the national government. The powers of state governments are neither increased nor decreased based on whether presidential electors are selected along the state boundary lines, or national lines (as with the National Popular Vote).
November 7th, 2012 | 5:42 pm
A natural corrective to the perceived problems ion presidential elections would seem to be a return to a more robust Federalism, one in which the Federal government is less intrusive. The Founders, while we’re on the subject, conceived of the Presidency as a weak office and were at pains to trammel his prerogatives with numerous checks and balances. If presidents were returned to their senses, to a humbler self-estimation, to a view of their role lacking the pretensions to Messianism that, since 1933, they have been actively encouraged to act upon, the worries concerning the Electoral College’s alleged inequities would recede and the institution could be appreciated for what it was designed to be: a method for selecting a “presiding officer” for a brief interval of time, whose task it is to take care that the laws framed and ratified by others are faithfully executed, who is definitely NOT a latter-day Caesar.
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