It would be a great step toward democracy if it passes. Do you think that the National Popular Vote Law would stand-up in court?
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There is nothing in the Constitution that prevents states from making the decision now that winning the national popular vote is required to win the Electoral College and the presidency.
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Except they’ll still be free to exercise their own judgment when it comes time for the Electoral College to vote.
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I guess you’re right, unless the courts decide it is an illegal run-around the Constitution by some states.
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And in the original Constitution, each slave was ‘worth’ 3/5th of a person. It’s long since time we went to a national popular vote.
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Not even that.
That “3/5th of a person” was not a measure of what a slave was worth intrinsically. On the contrary, it was a measure of what a slave-owner could claim for himself by virtue of owning slaves.
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The Electoral Collede is an invitation to chaos and distrust of the winner’s legitimacy, no matter how the courts rule. But its hard to see this version of SCOTUS doing anything, other than upholding the ‘original intent’. We don’t need a favorable decision, we need a Constitutional Amendment, getting rid of the EC, once and for all.
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Voters are people. The House is apportioned so that each state has at least one Congresscreature and so that representation is proportional to the state’s population. The House is limited by statute to 435 members. The result is a very inexact proportional system.
That fact that an apportionment method isn’t exactly proportional doesn’t (and shouldn’t) stop us from doing it. What we should do is minimize the roundoff error to the extent possible. The EC doesn’t succeed in minimizing the roundoff error. The House apportionment does a better job, but it would be better if the House was larger. We ought to take the lowest population state, and set that state’s apportionment at 1 member. Then we figure out how large the House is going to be for the next decade.
Every voter in every state would not be politically relevant or equal in presidential elections.
And this differs from our current situation which allocates one EC vote per member of the US Congress plus 3 for the District of Columbia exactly how?
It would sharply increases the odds of no candidate getting the majority of electoral votes needed, leading to the selection of the president by the U.S. House of Representatives, regardless of the popular vote anywhere.
This assumes facts not in evidence. As long as the parties carefully select their electors to be faithful to their pledge I don’t think you are correct in this.
It would not accurately reflect the nationwide popular vote;
Why should the EC vote reflect the national popular vote? It was never intended to reflect the popular vote.
My political science professor held that one of the (then) current advantages of the EC (over the popular vote) was that it created the appearance of greater support than indicated in the popular vote. I questioned that then, now, 40+ years later I think he was full of shit.
It would reduce the influence of any state, if not all states adopted.
What does the pronoun it refer to? If it refers to a proportional allocation of EVs within each state, it would likely make our current problems worse.
It would not improve upon the current situation in which four out of five states and four out of five voters in the United States are ignored by presidential campaigns, but instead, would create a very small set of states in which only one electoral vote is in play (while making most states politically irrelevant),
It would not make every vote equal.
We don’t have a one-voter, one vote system currently. As long as we have a Senate equally allocated across states we can’t have both the EC and a system in which all voters have equal weight in presidential voting. That is just arithmetic.
It would not guarantee the Presidency to the candidate with the most popular votes in the country.
If that is what we want, it would be simpler to abolish the EC and elect the president and vice president by direct voting. If we were prepared to do that heavy lift, we ought to join the 19th Century (post Condorcet) and use a single-transferable vote (STV) system in all elections.
The National Popular Vote bill is the way to make every person’s vote equal and matter to their candidate because it guarantees the majority of Electoral College votes to the candidate who gets the most votes among all 50 states and DC.
NPV is not a bill, it is a collection of bills in various state legislatures. I would be remiss if I failed to note that the NPV Coalition is itself rather anti-democratic. While it can’t go into effect unless and until the Coalition has sufficient votes to control the EC, the states that are not part of the Coalition have no voice in its installation.
Yes, the NPV Coalition is intended to get around our clunky amendment system. As I noted above, abolishing the EC and installing a rational voting system (like STV) is a heavy lift: we have to have the bill pass both houses of congress and then pass 37 state legislatures. At least we wouldn’t have to have Trumplethinskin’s signature on it.
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The electors have been and will be dedicated party activist supporters of the winning party’s candidate who meet briefly in mid-December to cast their totally predictable rubberstamped votes in accordance with their pre-announced pledges.
There have been 24,067 electoral votes cast since presidential elections became competitive (in 1796), and only 31 have been cast in a deviant way, for someone other than the candidate nominated by the elector’s own political party (one clear faithless elector, 29 grand-standing votes, and one accidental vote). 1796 remains the only instance when the elector might have thought, at the time he voted, that his vote might affect the national outcome.
There have been hundreds of unsuccessful proposed amendments to modify or abolish the Electoral College - more than any other subject of Constitutional reform.
To abolish the Electoral College would need a constitutional amendment, and could be stopped by states with as little as 3% of the U.S. population.
Instead, state legislation, The National Popular Vote bill is 73% of the way to guaranteeing the majority of Electoral College votes and the presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in the country, by changing state winner-take-all laws (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but later enacted by 48 states), without changing anything in the Constitution, using the built-in method that the Constitution provides for states to make changes.
It requires enacting states with 270 electoral votes to award their electoral votes to the winner of the most national popular votes.
All voters would be valued equally in presidential elections, no matter where they live.
The U.S. Constitution says “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.”
The normal way of changing the method of electing the President is by state legislatures with governors making changes in state law.
Historically, major changes in the method of electing the President have come about by state legislative action. For example, the people had no vote for President in most states in the nation’s first election in 1789. However, now, as a result of changes in the state laws governing the appointment of presidential electors, the people have the right to vote for presidential electors in 100% of the states.
In 1789, only 3 states used the winner-take-all method (awarding all of a state’s electoral vote to the candidate who gets the most votes in the state). However, as a result of changes in state laws, the winner-take-all method is now currently used by 48 of the 50 states.
In 1789, it was necessary to own a substantial amount of property in order to vote; however, as a result of changes in state laws, there are now no property requirements for voting in any state.
In other words, neither of the two most important features of the current system of electing the President (namely, that the voters may vote and the winner-take-all method) are in the U.S. Constitution. Neither was the choice of the Founders when they went back to their states to organize the nation’s first presidential election.
The normal process of effecting change in the method of electing the President is specified in the U.S. Constitution, namely action by the state legislatures. This is how the current system was created, and this is the built-in method that the Constitution provides for making changes. The abnormal process is to go outside the Constitution and amend it.
States can, and have, changed their method of awarding electoral votes over the years. Maine (in 1969) and Nebraska (in 1992) chose not to have winner-take-all laws
The constitutional wording does not encourage, discourage, require, or prohibit the use of any particular method for awarding a state’s electoral votes.
The National Popular Vote bill is 73% of the way to guaranteeing the majority of Electoral College votes and the presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in the country, by changing state winner-take-all laws (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but later enacted by 48 states), without changing anything in the Constitution, using the built-in method that the Constitution provides for states to make changes.
It requires enacting states with 270 electoral votes to award their electoral votes to the winner of the most national popular votes.
With National Popular Vote, every voter, in every state, for every candidate, would be politically relevant and equal in every presidential election.
All votes would count equally towards the national vote
The vote of every voter in the country (Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or Green) would help his or her preferred candidate win the Presidency. Every vote in the country would become as important as a vote in a battleground state such as New Hampshire or Florida. The National Popular Vote bill would give voice to every voter in the country, as opposed to treating voters for candidates who did not win a plurality in the state as if they did not exist.
The National Popular Vote bill would give a voice to the minority party voters for president in each state. Now they don’t matter to their candidate.
In 2012, 56,256,178 (44%) of the 128,954,498 voters had their vote diverted by the winner-take-all rule to a candidate they opposed (namely, their state’s first-place 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 presidential candidates.
Utah (5 electoral votes) alone generated a margin of 385,000 “wasted” votes for Bush in 2004.
Oklahoma (7 electoral votes) alone generated a margin of 455,000 “wasted” votes for Bush in 2004 – larger than the margin generated by the 9th and 10th largest states, namely New Jersey and North Carolina (each with 15 electoral votes).
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).
Of COURSE NPV is a bill.
The National Popular Vote bill was approved in 2016 by a unanimous bipartisan House committee vote in both Georgia (16 electoral votes) and Missouri (10).
Since 2006, the bill has passed 40 state legislative chambers in 24 rural, small, medium, large, Democratic, Republican and purple states with 271 electoral votes, including one house in Arizona (11), Arkansas (6), Maine (4), Michigan (16), Minnesota (10), North Carolina (15), and Oklahoma (7), and both houses in Nevada (6).
The bill has been enacted by 16 small, medium, and large jurisdictions with 196 electoral votes – 73% of the way to guaranteeing the majority of Electoral College votes and the presidency to the candidate with the most national popular votes.
When enacted by states with 270 electoral votes, it would change state winner-take-all laws (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but later enacted by 48 states), in the enacting states, without changing anything in the Constitution, using the built-in method that the Constitution provides for states to make changes.
Unable to agree on any particular method for selecting presidential electors, the Founding Fathers left the choice of method exclusively to the states in Article II, Section 1
“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.”
The constitutional wording does not encourage, discourage, require, or prohibit the use of any particular method for awarding a state’s electoral vote
In 1789, in the nation’s first election, a majority of the states appointed their presidential electors by appointment by the legislature or by the governor and his cabinet, the people had no vote for President in most states, and in states where there was a popular vote, only men who owned a substantial amount of property could vote, and only three states used the state-by-state winner-take-all method to award electoral votes (and all three stopped using it by 1800).
In the nation’s first presidential election in 1789 and second election in 1792, the states employed a wide variety of methods for choosing presidential electors, including
● appointment of the state’s presidential electors by the Governor and his Council,
● appointment by both houses of the state legislature,
● popular election using special single-member presidential-elector districts,
● popular election using counties as presidential-elector districts,
● popular election using congressional districts,
● popular election using multi-member regional districts,
● combinations of popular election and legislative choice,
● appointment of the state’s presidential electors by the Governor and his Council combined with the state legislature, and
● statewide popular election.
As a result of changes in state laws enacted since 1789, the people have the right to vote for presidential electors in 100% of the states, there are no property requirements for voting in any state, and the state-by-state winner-take-all method is used by 48 of the 50 states. States can, and have, changed their method of awarding electoral votes over the years. Maine (in 1969) and Nebraska (in 1992) chose not to have winner-take-all laws
The 10th Circuit is correct and the author is wrong. Votes have consequences, and we elect people to represent our interests as they see fit. Not to rubber stamp whatever… otherwise why even have an electoral college vote?? Choose the electoral college person wisely because it is important.
Can we change it so each state gets EC votes equal to the number of their representatives in the house. By eliminating two for each state you get close to the previous census allotment and would take away the unfair advantage of sparsely populated states.
Another thought. If one looks at Justice Roberts legal career in government plus two of his worst and most famous opinions ( Citizens United and Shelby County vs. Holder), you find he has commited himself to suppressing votes. Making it risky with this court.
One issue here is that the electors don’t deliberate. It is highly unlikely that the Democrats would choose an elector who is at all likely to deviate. And every faithless elector since the civil war has done so knowing that it won’t make a difference – they want to be an asterisk in the history books and/or make a statement. And they will still be persona non grata anyway.
The reason for all of this litigation is fear of the interstate vote compact becoming real. At that point, they’ve blown up the entire Confederate preservation scheme (and places like West Virginia are going to be invaded by Democratic activists since losing the state by 20 points is better than losing by 30 points.
All true. And none of that changes the fact that they can vote in a manner other than their prior pledge indicates.
Just because something hasn’t happened, doesn’t mean it can’t. After all, a snake-oil salesman from Brooklyn who managed to bankrupt a casino had never won the Presidency for the party that talks up family values and fiscal responsibility before…