Ever since I sat in on the legislative hearing for H678, "the agreement among states to elect the President by national popular vote," I've been a cheerleader for the National Popular Vote. "Disclose conflicts of interest" — after the hearing, I started volunteering at MassVOTE to support the bill. Here's why.
The plan is to enter Massachusetts into the interstate compact recently passed by Maryland. Under this plan, nothing will change until states holding a majority of electoral votes enter the compact. At that point, they will all cast their electoral votes for the winner of the national popular vote, who will be guaranteed to win the election.
According to FairVote, in 2004 more money was spent on ads in Florida than in 45 other states combined. Massachusetts, the cradle of American democracy, was reduced to mere spectator status in our nation’s most important election.
Even worse than the ad money, in the two years before the election, the Bush campaign and the Kerry campaign didn't run even a single national poll — if you didn't live in a swing state, they just didn't care what you thought.
I always assumed the Electoral College was designed to serve some useful purpose. It turns out that's not true — it was designed to help out the southern states, who got 3/5 of an electoral vote for their slave populations, and to help out the small states by giving them an electoral vote for each senator. The first reason, fortunately, doesn't apply any more. The second reason has gone disastrously wrong — out of the 13 smallest states, 10 of them show up at the bottom of FairVote's attention list, receiving not one visit and not one ad during the last 6 weeks of the 2004 election.
The system is broken, and finally, after over 200 years, we have a chance to fix it. This is a live bill with a chance to pass in early 2008 — please pitch in and help!
More reading:
- NationalPopularVote.com
- Every Vote Equal: A State-Based Plan For Electing The President By National Popular Vote — contains tons of details on the state-by-state plan, and answers to common concerns
- Common Cause MA — a web form to show your support for H678, the National Popular Vote bill (but if you have the time, send a real letter or a phone call …)
EDIT: if you’d like any kind of help advocating the National Popular Vote bill to legislators or the press, please don’t hesitate to contact me at jack [at] massvote [dot] org. Also, don’t miss that Common Cause link above — it’s the easiest way to mail or email your legislators and show your support.
But I do NOT believe in disarming unilaterally, either. This bill and the one in CA are, by the nature of the thing, partisan, because this bill in our two states has the result of handing electors to Republicans – and in the case of CA, a LOT of electors.
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p>Give me a completely national bill (ie passed by the national Congress) that accomplishes this, then we’ll talk. I’m not sure a “majority” of electors means a fair amount of electors. When Texas and California both are required to hand electors out by popular vote at the same time (ie an equal amount of electors from each “type” of state” are required to switch), I will support this, and not a moment sooner. Yeah, it sucks, but while we’re trying to fix this, we shouldn’t have to give up the ability to win an election for the party we support.
This is a great point, Lynne, but H678 takes care of it. This bill is nothing like the terrible California bill I think you’re referring to.
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p>The way this one works, Massachusetts enters something called an “interstate compact,” which is a binding contract between the states.
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p>In this interstate compact, Massachusetts would give its electors to the winner of the national popular vote ONLY when states holding 270 electoral votes joined. Once that happened, all of the states together would cast their votes for the winner, who would be 100% guaranteed to win.
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p>In other words, passing H678 means:
– You get more votes than anyone else in the national election, you win the Presidency.
– You get fewer votes than someone else in the national election, you lose the Presidency.
That’s all it would mean, and that would be guaranteed.
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p>It wouldn’t matter whether Texas entered the compact or not — the only thing that matters is whether states with 270 electoral votes have entered.
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p>(By the way, although the interstate compact is binding, we can get out if we want to. The only time we couldn’t get out would be during the last six months before the inauguration, to make sure no one tries to game the system.)
Yes, Peter, it means that your Republican vote for President cast in Massachusetts will count for the first time ever. On the other hand, the compact won’t ever reach critical mass without participation from red states, so it also means that if a Democrat wins, they’ll be getting red-state electors. That’s why it’s important that no one can back out at the last minute.
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p>The key point is this: if you’re looking for a partisan leg up, this isn’t the issue for you. The country is just about evenly divided now, and it still will be when we use a national popular vote.
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p>On the other hand, if you think that every vote in America should count, whether you live in Massachusetts or Texas, Republican or Democrat, I hope you’ll speak up in support.
and Mondale?!
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p>I don’t believe it.
That’s a remarkably concise demonstration of some of the major things wrong with the Republican party.
This particular proposal is brand new to me, but it seems like it avoids the CA issue.
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p>The concept of the CA bill would be OK if everyone else did the same thing. It’s only totally screwy because it would make a solid blue state less effectively blue, while doing nothing to change a comparable red state, like, say, Texas.
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p>I’m OK with MA electoral votes going to a Republican candidate if they win the popular vote.
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p>It seems like it would make it harder to rig elections, too- you can’t just tip the scales in, say, Ohio; you have to tip the scales by a little bit in a lot of places.
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p>I’m sure there are lots of unintended consequences to consider, but this idea looks good to me.
This is the best way to solve the electoral college problem without a constitutional amendment (which everyone knows would never pass). It still uses the electoral college to elect the president, as required by the Constitution, but makes it basically irrelevant by forcing electors to obey the will of the national popular vote. It’s a very clever solution to a difficult problem, especially because you only have to sign up enough states to constitute a majority of the electoral votes.
… The CA bill, if adopted everywhere, would still weigh individual populations as unequal because it does nothing the skew the electoral college. The other proposal OTH, bypasses the college completely and results in truly equal weighting of votes geographically.
Not only is it profoundly different from the partisan initiative-petition effort in California, it could also be the antidote.
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p>Suppose the initiative goes forward. Then suppose the State of California meanwhile adopts NPV. The proposal then become fundamentally different–to repeal and stymie a national reform. Much harder sell.
While on the surface the idea sounds great, it actualy opens even wider the options for fraud. Imagine if you will, that rather than screwing with vote counts in a few suspect precincts in swing states, the powers that be could now assert that same effort over EVERY precinct nationaly to get the same desired effect.
If the system that exists today can not be effectivly monitored how would it be better monitored by opening things up more?
Not meaning to be the cynic but politics IS evil and you know how they will play the game if given the chance.
If someone is able to “screw with vote counts” in every precinct in America, then they deserve the Presidency.
I’ll echo that. Making fraud less rewarding is another good reason for a national popular vote. In 2000, fraudsters could (and maybe did) swing the whole election by shifting less than 600 votes.
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p>Meanwhile, there’s only been one election in the last 100 years that you could shift with less than 500,000 votes — and not even one you could shift with less than 100,000 votes.
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p>If you wanted to steal the 2000 election under a national popular vote plan, you would have had to fake 550,000 votes. I don’t care who you are — that’s going to be tough to sweep under the rug.
There are two problems with your argument. The first is the practical/empirical one, pointed out by sco and Jack in response. If every state is now “in play”, then fraudsters can no longer focus on an individual state in order to change the outcome of a national election.
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p>The second problem is one of priorities. Let’s face it: votes in non-swing states effectively count less than votes in swing states under our Electoral College system. Are you really saying that we shouldn’t fully enfranchise non-swing state voters them, because fraudsters might try to take their full enfranchisement away from them? With the same logic, you could conclude that we shouldn’t have given black people the right do vote because that caused Jim Crow.
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p>Our electoral college system commits more fraud and causes more disenfranchisement than anything individuals could perpetrate under the National Popular Vote. The only difference is that electoral college fraud is legal.
Jack did a great job in describing the National Popular Vote plan (H. 678) and in answering questions about it. Here are some additional points:
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p>· H. 678 is now on the House calendar for a vote (we hope in January) after receiving the strong support of the Election Laws Committee.
· This is the most significant electoral reform to reach the floor in a long time and despite the widespread support in the legislature (I’ve personally spoken to over 100 legislators) we need more supportive calls, letters, and emails to reach legislators. For the short-on-time our website has a click and send email.
· We have been doing monthly phone banks in support. The next is January 3rd at 6:00 at the Common Cause office. Bring your cell phones.
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p>If Massachusetts passes the National Popular Vote plan, it will still require about 25 other states to join us. Maryland has already enacted the plan, Illinois is about to join them (passed both Houses), and New Jersey is voting next week. It looks good there and in several other states next year.
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p>I am convinced that a popular vote will invigorate public participation and grassroots politics in Presidential elections. Imaging not getting on the phone (or the bus) to Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire or another swing state, but rather canvassing your own neighborhood! All votes equal? Amazing.
and JackCushman does a fine job explaining the details.
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p>Where I diverge, though, is his claims on history. Got any citations or sources?
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p>In the 1700s, it wasn’t clear if the people would be able to wisely elect the president. A lack of education and the very slow way that media moved made for a politically uneducated populace. By electing electors from their state, they could vote based on a more local knowledge and based on general principles, and then rely on those electors to select the candidate who most closely met those principles.
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p>There are lots of good reasons why we have the E.C., and security is a big one.
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p>In modern times, it’s true that some states are awfully close, and they can be FL or OH. However, auditing the process in the case of a close election only requires auditing those particular states. With scarce resources, election monitors can be assigned to locations [states] where history or polling suggest a more closely fought election. There’s no point in committing election fraud in Wyoming or Rhode Island — the results would be so far from the expected mean that there’d be investigations out the ying yang. Conversely, flipping one vote out of one hundred nationwide would stay below the radar, because the results would closely match each precinct’s patterns. With a direct popular vote, that wins you the election. With the E.C., it is unlikely to do so because it wouldn’t change the outcome of most states.
The origins of the Electoral College are not as important as how it operates today, which I would argue distorts our politics, disenfranchises voters, and encourages fraud and manipulation of elections.
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p>But both you and Jack are correct about some of the historical elecments of the institution. There was no mass communication and that presented challenges to informing voters. But the electoral college is also tied up with slavery in that the South insisted on having slaves count for 3/5th of a person for both Congressional apportionment and Presidential Electors in order to sign the Constitution. (The number of Electors is the number of Congressional districts plus 2). They were the proverbial “small” states we hear about. Most had small populations and few qualified voters (the South had very strict property holding requirements too) but had much larger numbers of Electors because of the 3/5ths compromise. With a popular vote, which the South vociferously opposed, Northern states would have selected many more of our early Presidents. Here’s a good law review article on the subject by Paul Finkleman. But you can also google and get lots of other citations.
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p>As for fraud, there is more incentive to do it and more significant likelihood of success if the universe of votes needed to win the Presidency is the range of 500 (a la Florida 2000) or 40,000 (as in Ohio 2004). The bigger the pool of votes the more difficult it is to manipulate the outcome. As long as the election boils down to flipping a few thousand voters in a handful of states, this country will suffer from fraud and manipulation, lack of public participation, and those distorted red-and-blue election night maps. Why should the voters in Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania decide the outcome for an entire nation?
Jack did link to length business week article on the topic that quotes a history professor backing up his claims. In contrast, you haven’t linked to anything for your own historic claims.
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p>Your argument about “security” suffers from the same two problems as nomad’s comment above, plus a degree of elitism.
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p>The founders chose the electoral college and against the direct election of Senators, both in part to protect the “minority of opulent against the majority” as Madison put it. Hamilton thought the masses were too prone to “timult and disorder” to make such big decisions. It wasn’t the populace that deemed themselves too “politically uneducated” to make those decisions — it was certain elites who viewed them that way.
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p>Fortunately, we now directly elect Senators, and it’s time we directly elect the President as well.