Hi BMGers,
I have been a long time reader and have finally signed up. One of the many issues that I hold dear to my heart is the National Popular Vote movement/bill.
We have a version here in Massachusetts, House Bill 678, that should be brought up for a vote in the House any day now.
I am asking you, and would very much appreciate it, if you would be willing to call your own State Rep. and Rep. Alice Wolf who can be contacted at 617-868-WOLF.
I have been told that Rep. Wolf may be working against the bill and I think it would be very helpful for her to hear from Cambridge residents and Massachusetts residents as a whole on this topic and bill since a vast majority of us support the very democratic notion of “1 person, 1 vote” that is NPV.
And you can find more info on the National Popular Vote movement/bill here…..
http://www.nationalpopularvote…
or here….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N…
And just fyi, there is a lot of support for this bill. Speaker Dimasi and Senate Pres. Murray support the bill along with many others. Lets do everything we can to make sure this is a slam dunk and make Massachusetts the 5th state to pass NPV! (Well, probably the 6th or 7th state once it hopefully gets to the Governor’s desk to sign as NPV bills have already passed both houses of Rhode Island and most recently California.) If you have any questions please feel free to ask.
Thanks so much!
Best,
Paul
Alice Wolf is opposed to NPV? She’s listed on the Common Cause page as endorsing the bill. This is one of those no-brainer, pro-democracy measures I would expect her, of all people to be in favor of.
. . . but both she and her aide were out of the office at the time. If anyone can confirm whether she “may be working against the bill”, as Paul says he heard, that would be useful information. I wouldn’t want her reputation as an electoral reformer wrongly tarnished.
Well I absolutely love Rep. Wolf just fyi. She’s done a lot of great things on so many issues. And I’m actually on the Cambridge City Committee with her as I’m from Cambridge too and she represents her community very well.
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p>With that being said, I was also really shocked when I heard Rep. Wolf may be hurting the bill. I’m not trying to tarnish her reputation by any means, but simply would like this bill supported and passed in the House. I’ll try to update with more details when I get them.
“I believe this vote in this House is premature. The reason is, this is an extremely serious matter. The process we’ve gone through is not nearly thorough enough to have vetted the particular solutions to the issues we have. We might consider having a number of hearings in the State House. Our citizens, as well as our legislators should have a lengthy, serious and deep discussion about a matter of such serious consequence, and where we are going through a process that is somewhat an end-run of our constitution. There might be other options to correct some of the concern that people have expressed. For example, the concern that right now, there’s not a lot at stake for candidates to go through each of the states. Instead of winner take all electoral votes, why not proportional electors?”
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p>Those are her words from today. I hope you’ll give Rep. Wolf a call and let her know your views on the issue.
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p>And voting by CD/PR are much worse ideas. The only way to realistically guarantee that everyone’s vote counts equally is through the National Popular Vote bill.
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p>-Paul
Thank you for the info. The esteem in which I held Rep. Wolf just dropped several notches.
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p>Yes, voting by CD/PR are much worse ideas. She’s speaking as if these other options haven’t been studied in detail, but they have, and the results are even worse than what he have now.
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p>There is a very simple criterion any voting system should pass: if a candidate is the first choice of a majority of voters, that candidate should win. Any form of Electoral College (winner-take-all, CD, or PR) violates even that most basic criterion.
the beauty of the NPV is that you only need a relatively small number of states to pull it off. Proportional electors or some other such solution might be OK too, but since it would require basically every state to participate, it’ll never happen.
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p>I’m surprised Rep. Wolf is so timid on this. Disappointing.
Is this the invasion of the body snatchers, or something? A proportional system would be disastrous in terms of effecting the national system. While a NPV won’t change the income of presidential elections (because red states have a majority of the voters, no matter how we slice it) a proportional system in states like Massachusetts could dramatically impact the electoral system, making it much harder for Democrats to win – and we’re already working on a 2:1 Republican advantage throughout the history of the parties.
… it would cause some states to enforce their proportionality via a system of districts. Now you can have gerrymandering and create districts your party likes.
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p>Not guaranteed, of course. But thinking strategically from the perspective of party pols, its the best way I can think of on the spur of the moment to eke an advantage.
Rep. Wolf moved that debate on the bill be postponed until Tuesday, July 15. The motion was amended to postpone the bill until July 9.
I wish I had time to write a long post about this, but I don’t.
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p>I fervently hope this bill does not pass. I think NPV would make our presidential elections more messed up and less meaningfully democratic.
I would love to hear the logical arguments, but from everything I’ve read and studied so far, NPV seems to be a pretty darn great bill and would make our elections much more democratic.
I really, really don’t get why you’d think that…
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p>While it probably won’t help us elect more Democrats (believe me, I wish it would), it will at least make sure that Presidents are listening and engaging with states who’s interests are rarely heard.
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p>Yes, it would change nearly everything about how to run a national campaign, but we’ll adjust soon. It would probably mean we’d need more resources and more grassroots volunteers – and we’d need them everywhere – but I think all those facets are actually very little things. No one will be at a disadvantage, because we’d both have to learn how to run a system like that. But no matter who learns it quicker, it will be a fast transition for both parties.
I very very strongly feel that elections where the goal is to pick a single winner, over a very large region, are made much more democratic if either the region shrinks or it is split up into smaller voting districts which are then combined proportional to their population. We can’t “shrink” the country in electing the president – although we can when electing members of Congress, by having more members of Congress, something which I think we ought to do.
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p>Now, we have a districted system, where the districts are states. It has a few flaws:
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p>1. Small states get representation disproportionate to their population. Although I see that as a flaw, it is part of the initial compromise that founded the country, so if we want to get rid of it, I think we need to have a national conversation about that specific issue, forthrightly and honestly: Do we still believe small states should be overrepresented? If we don’t, the simple solution is to drop the extra electoral votes they get.
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p>2. States vary too much in size. There’s a non-simple fix to this, which is to assign EVs by congressional district instead of in statewide blocks. The glaring flaw with that solution is that congressional districts can be gerrymandered, while states cannot. Given that balance, I’d rather stick with states as districts for now, though if we can solve the gerrymandering problem, congressional districts would be better.
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p>3. Electors in the Electoral College aren’t bound to vote the way they should. That mostly hasn’t been a problem: we don’t get election results altered by the electors. It could happen in theory, though the political pressure against it may be overwhelming. But perhaps it’s something we should address with an amendment.
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p>However, solving the flaws in the districted system we have now by throwing it out and going to a flat national vote is no solution, it’s replacing one flawed system with another, extremely more flawed, system.
“I very very strongly feel that elections where the goal is to pick a single winner, over a very large region, are made much more democratic if either the region shrinks or it is split up into smaller voting districts which are then combined proportional to their population.”
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p>Voting by Congressional District would pretty much be the (Electoral College)^2. So rather than Presidential candidates paying attention only to swing states, they would only pay attention to swing districts. Even more people would be marginalized(yes, it is possible~!) than they are now and be relegated to sideline status.
To begin with, what makes you think the number of people living in “swing CDs” would magically be so extremely lower than the number of people living in “swing states”? Other than as the effect of gerrymandering, which as I said is a very strong reason not to vote by CD in most of the country now. But if that were solved, theoretically, about as many people should live in swing CDs as now live in swing states. Even the reddest and bluest states have some swing CDs in them. So that gets rid of that hyperbolic “EC^2” claim.
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p>But more than that, CDs are pretty small, so it’s hard to “pay attention to” just the ones you want. Imagine someone trying to campaign for Massachusett’s 9th CD (Lynch) without campaigning for the 8th or 4th (Capuano, Frank) because those are too liberal? Not only is there that, but it also means you can’t campaign for a swing state by concentrating on just one part of it (like the big city at one edge) – you’re likely to need to try to win some other parts of the state too, rather than focusing on an overwhelming margin in one corner.
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p>In practice, smaller more uniform districts would put the candidates in every state, and in more parts of those states.
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p>I think you haven’t really thought this through.
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p>I think most supporters of NPV either haven’t really thought it through, or simply aren’t familiar with the nuts & bolts of how elections actually work. I know there are some people who support NPV who have thought about it and who do know election mechanics well enough to understand how they’d be affected, and simply disagree with me, but in my experience those are a minority. Most don’t understand what the real effects of NPV would be.
Your assertion, “So that gets rid of that hyperbolic “EC^2″ claim” is false.
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p>How about we actually look at some facts to see the differences between CD and NPV, shall we?
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p>When Bush lost the national popular vote in 2000, he won 55% of the country’s 435 congressional districts (as compared to his 50.+% of electoral votes). In 2004, Bush won 50.7% of the popular vote, but 59% of the districts (as compared to his 53% of electoral votes). Voting by CD worsens the problem as can be seen in the results above.
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p>And EVEN IF voting by CD was very similar to NPV, which it’s not (again, see results above), there would still be the major problem of people being disenfranchised and their votes not mattering.
How could they possibly become less democratic than oucurrent situation, where over 2/3 of the country are relegated to spectators in the presidential election?
If this bill had been in effect in 1972 – would our state’s electoral votes have gone to Richard Nixon and NOT George McGovern?
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p>If that’s the case I think this bill should not pass.
And to Reagan.
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p>And to ’41’.
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p>And I STILL think it’s a bad idea.
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p>You and me, Cos!
is that it doesn’t matter where you live. Someone living in Montana shouldn’t have their vote count more than someone living in California. Everyone’s vote would count EQUALLY and whoever gets the most votes would win. I really don’t get the opposition to this idea.
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p>The flip side is that most states get no attention from the presidential candidates, having some votes count more than others (state vs. state) and other votes that don’t count at all (ex. Republican in a “Blue” state or Democrat in a “Red” state), and the possibility (and reality) of someone being chosen as President who did not receive the most votes. This is what the electoral college is and it is exactly those problems that the National Popular Vote would fix.
If all we want is for more equal representation, then the problem isn’t that we split up votes by state, it’s that small states are overrepresented because they get two extra electoral votes (so do large states, but proportionally it makes more difference for the small once). Note that that distortion of voting power was done on purpose as part of the nation’s founding compromise. If we want to do away with it, we should have a constitutional amendment to remove the extra two EVs that each state gets, and have a national debate about that specific issue and only that.
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p>NPV lumps it in with a bunch of other issues, most notable the issue of whether we should vote in districts (aka states in this case) or in a single flat national total. That’s a huge change, that is different from and separate from the issue of overrepresentation of small states.
it still wouldn’t be 100% proportional. It’s only proportional to an extent and furthermore changes occur more drastically over time because there are 10 year spans over EV reapportionment.
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p>The only way to be completely proportionate is to count each vote.
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p>”If all we want is for more equal representation, then the problem isn’t that we split up votes by state, it’s that small states are overrepresented because they get two extra electoral votes (so do large states, but proportionally it makes more difference for the small once).”
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p>Well I would say part of the problem is that there isn’t equal representation, but also another big part of it is that there is no representation for most states which is why even small states are signing NPV bills such as Rhode Island which just passed it in their legislature.
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p>And what the Constitution actually says on this topic is…
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p>”Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.”
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p>The Constitution does not limit how a state may choose its electors and such practices have changed many times over the course of history.
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p>In a 1919 case involving a state statute entitled “An act granting to women the right to vote for presidential electors,” the Maine Supreme Judicial Court wrote (In re Opinion of the Justices):
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p>”[E]ach state is thereby clothed with the absolute power to appoint electors in such manner as it may see fit, without any interference or control on the part of the federal government, except, of course, in case of attempted discrimination as to race, color, or previous condition of servitude….”
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p>And another case,McPherson v. Blacker, the U.S. Supreme Court observed in the 1892 case:
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p>”The constitution does not provide that the appointment of electors shall be by popular vote, nor that the electors shall be voted for upon a general ticket, nor that the majority of those who exercise the elective franchise can alone choose the electors.” …
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p>”In short, the appointment and mode of appointment of electors belong exclusively to the states under the constitution of the United States.”
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p>
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p>You can make the same arguments about our representation in Congress, and in state legislatures. It’s proportional to population, but subject to the same imperfections you refer to. I still consider that proportional and fair, and the imperfections are definitely worth it to get people representing relatively small districts.
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p>However, if you’re dissatisfied with that kind of equal representation, then you need to get rid of the entire system, because all our legislatures are 100% tainted by it. Presidential elections should be the least of your worries.
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p>Personally, I think it’s a red herring.
If NPV passes in enough states to go into effect, then the winner of the presidency would be the one who wins the most votes nationwide. Period.
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p>To make that happen, when NPV goes into effect, every state that signs up for NPV would give all their electoral votes to the winner of the National Popular Vote. Yes, that would mean Massachusetts gives all it’s electoral votes to the Republican, if the Republican wins the most votes nationwide. And if Texas signs up, it would give all its electoral votes to the Democratic if the Democrat wins the most votes nationwide.
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p>The point of NPV is that the Electoral College would not really matter in and of itself — it would just be a vehicle for ensuring that the National Popular Vote is the only number that counts.
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p>If you’re concerned that it would have looked like a bigger loss for McGovern in 1972, don’t be. Exactly the opposite would be true. First, once NPV is in effect, regardless of the winner it would “look” like the winner trounced the other candidate in the Electoral College votes. But no one would care about the number of Electoral College votes, because it’s fundamentally the NPV that matters.
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p>Second, McGovern won only 17 (3%) of the EC votes, but he won 37.5% of the popular vote. It was the importance of the EC that made his loss look far bigger than it actually was. If the NPV were in place, we would only look at the relevant 37.5% number.
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p>The NPV kicks in when states representing 270 EVs sign up, regardless of their “red, blue, or purple” status. So, if 270+ EVs worth of states sign up, and they happen to be the Kerry states plus CO and MO or some such, then in cases where the GOP candidate wins the popular vote it would look like a landslide but in cases where the Dem candidate wins the popular vote it would certainly not.
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p>But, as you point out, none of that matters. The goal isn’t to win POTUS by a landslide, it’s to win. Once the NPV is enacted in enough states, the goal will no longer be to form a coalition of states worth enough points in which to win the plurality; rather it will be to win more votes nationwide than any other candidate.
Since I do want to understand opposition to this bill by people I respect, I’m poking around for possible reasons for not loving it (and hoping that Cos will find time to ‘splain it all to us in advance of the vote; btw, Rep. Sean Garballey tells me that it is currently slated for next Wednesday).
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p>Anyway, the rundown at wikipedia looks pretty good.
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p>Regarding the objection based on state level electoral votes not matching the popular vote in a given state:
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p>Frankly, I’m much more concerned about losers of the popular vote winning the White House than I am about the ostensive shame in having Massachusetts electoral votes go to the national vote winner when our state vote didn’t go that way.
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p>Rep. Garballey reports that the vote postponement is for the purpose of allowing more debate (which I think is all good given the importance of the vote), and in particular, to allow the time for legislators to consult with scholars of constitutional law.
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p>Wikipedia with regard to the constitutional issue:
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My own thought is, if there are fine points of constitutional law to be debated by the experts, do legislators need to resolve them before voting? Or might we rely on the “checks and balances” of the judicial system to do that job?
My main objection is I strongly believe smaller voting districts = more effective democracy, and that the United States as a whole is waaaay too large to be a single voting district for anything while maintaining effective democracy. Many states are too large for that too, and in fact I think elections for governor in states like Texas, New York, and California could be much improved if they split up the states into several voting districts and added the results proportional to population.
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p>I don’t object to the mechanics of NPV, or doubt that it would achieve its goal. It’s the goal I object to: a single flat national voting district several time zones and hundreds of millions of people in size.
I read the description at nationalpopularvote.com, but it seemed a bit vague. Aren’t there states that don’t bother to count all absentee or overseas ballots if it’s not close enough to affect the outcome?
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p>And then in a close popular vote election you’d have calls for recounts in every state. States without a NPV law would refuse because all they need to determine under their laws is who won the state. And the law would really only matter in close elections since the popular vote winner usually wins anyway.
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p>Finally, there’s no way to know if we’ve ever had an election that would have had a different outcome with this law. Who would have won in 2000 if we had NPV? Nobody knows because the campaigns ran an electoral vote campaign not a popular vote campaign.
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p>I like the basic idea but I doubt it would actually work. If you’re really worried about one person, one vote work on proportional representation in the Senate. That would have a much bigger impact.
I have generally been able to count on him to cast his vote based on common sense and not emotion.
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p>His name is Jeff Perry, and he will vote against this silly legislation.
Asked them to deep six this foolishness. The framers were omnicient in foreseeing the tyranny of the majority. Who knew that USA would be tyrannized by the minority.
What does NPV have to do with the “tyranny” of the majority or the minority?
Based on her statement, Rep. Alice Wolf asked for more time and consideration for a measure of literally constitutional dimensions. I am speculating, but based on Rep. Garballey’s remarks about more time for consultations on the constitutional law issues and the fact that the House has been intensely focusing on the state budget, the delay until July 9 may serve (in the end) to make legislators, including Rep. Wolf, more comfortable with their votes for or against this bill. Or, conceivably, lead to a further public hearing on whether NPV is the right solution to an abiding flaw in our electoral process (also not a terrible result, since it couldn’t be used to elect a president until 2012). Precisely BECAUSE Rep. Wolf has a strong record of supporting electoral reform, I think that folks ought to accept that this is sincere, and perhaps prudent, hesitation on her part.
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p>Of course, I am NOT arguing that NPV supporters should stay silent. Making the case for and against NPV and the alternative solutions is helpful and I, for one, would be interested in hearing what evidence was presented at the committee hearing. For what it is worth, I personally feel ambivalent. Aside from my visceral reaction to hearing Massachusetts electors vote for a Republican when our vote went the other way (I first fell in love with Massachusetts when I saw the 1972 bumpersticker “Don’t blame me, I’m from Massachusetts”), I have one serious objection: is it right to go the compact route?
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p>The U.S. Constitution requires that 75% of the states ratify a constitutional amendment. The compact would go into effect with a majority of electoral votes, which is likely to be less than 50% of the states. Maybe we would get to 75% of the states before a presidential election is affected by the compact, maybe after one election and everyone sees that the world didn’t end with NPV. But the states passing NPV would FORCE major change on the remaining states in a way never contemplated by our Constitution. Is this the right way to do it? Are we confident that this is the only time that such a maneuver (or similar one) could be used? Are we creating a dangerous precedent, one that we may regret when something terrible is forced on Massachusetts? I genuinely haven’t figured this out. I’m sure others have a view on this.
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p>(Disclosure: I am chair of Rep. Wolf’s political committee, but my post is not authorized by her and I haven’t discussed the post, or shown it to her.)
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p>
If it isn’t unconstitutional, than it’s constitutional.
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p>Sure, it seems to be an end-around, but the bottom line is that if you’re worried about a “hole” in the constitution itself, than you ought to work on closing that hole. Worrying about precedent seems foolish; the cat is out of the bag and whether or not NPV goes through or not, folks are already thinking about how to use the same principle to get other things accomplished; either those ideas will be constitutional or not.
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p>I don’t know if this implementation of NPV is the right way to go on technical [vote counting in 50+1 locations] merits, but I have no qualms with accomplishing NPV with a coalition.
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p>If it isn’t unconstitutional, than it’s constitutional.
The argument isn’t that it’s “not” constitutional, but rather that it is a constitutional change that we have cleverly figured out how to make without having to actually amend the constitution. Given the magnitude, and the fact that it clearly is constitutional, it puts the onus on us to think about whether we should go for this effective “cheat”, or stick to the spirit & intent behind the constitution and achieve the level of majority support they contemplated. This isn’t about whether it can legally be done, but whether it should be done with only 50%.
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p>You can make arguments for both views on that, but simply explaining that it’s technically legal doesn’t make either of them.
Great to see you on here joining in on the conversation.
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p>As to your point, “Precisely BECAUSE Rep. Wolf has a strong record of supporting electoral reform, I think that folks ought to accept that this is sincere, and perhaps prudent, hesitation on her part.”…I didn’t mean to imply that it wasn’t. I have the upmost respect for Rep. Wolf. I assumed, as many on here have, that Rep. Wolf would have been at the forefront of this bill not only because of it’s substantive merit, but also because of how popular the idea is nationally, statewide, and in Cambridge. And so I just wanted to get this info out to create more discussion between the Representative and her constituents and hopefully help in Rep. Wolf’s decision.
Removing the accepted “two senators per state” and replacing it with a system in which a state has a number of U.S. senators proportional to its population?
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p>Is there anyone who supports the NPV but is against changing the way we elect U.S. Senators?
Hey Paul, I’m part of a group organizing a last minute NPV effort. If you read this, could you shoot me an email at . Thanks.
Thanks everyone for contacting your state Rep. and Alice Wolf and being proactive! I just heard that Rep. Alice Wolf, after discussing the bill further with constitutional scholars and hearing from constituents etc, will indeed be voting for the NPV bill!
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p>Hopefully today is the day that NPV passes in the House! I’ll update this post if, and hopefully when, it does.