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Mad About The Electoral College? Tell Your State Legislators To Create National Popular Vote Bill, But Think About It Carefully

By Dawn Papple
Published on: 07:11 PST, Nov 11, 2016

Plenty of people are mad that Trump has earned more electoral votes and has been named the President-elect, while Secretary Clinton seems to have won the popular vote. When the electoral votes do not reflect the popular vote, people get especially mad. It doesn’t happen often.

There is currently a viral trend that indicates that Americans would like to see each vote count equally, no matter who places the vote and no matter where they live.

Electoral votes are distributed fairly proportionally depending on the state’s populace, for the most part. It’s not as if a state the size of Vermont is given the same weight as a state the size of California. Very rarely, the popular vote is not mirrored by the electoral vote, though. Sometimes, not everyone comes out to vote in each state equally. California will have 55 electoral votes, even if only 100,000 people managed to make it out to vote on election day. Vermont will have three electoral votes, even if 350,000 voters show up at the polls.

We are the United States of America. We are a union of separate governments. When we vote for president, we are actually voting for one of the groups of electors to represent us and to tell Congress who our state has chosen. History.com has a clear explanation.

“In each presidential election year, a group of candidates for elector is nominated by political parties and other groupings in each state, usually at a state party convention, or by the party state committee. It is these elector-candidates, rather than the presidential and vice presidential nominees, for whom the people vote in the November election, which is held on Tuesday after the first Monday in November. In most states, voters cast a single vote for the slate of electors pledged to the party presidential and vice presidential candidates of their choice. The slate winning the most popular votes is elected; this is known as the winner-take-all, or general ticket, system.”

The Constitutional Convention of 1787 had thrown out multiple ways to elect a President. They even considered a direct popular election at that time. They dismissed that idea.

During the 1787 convention, the matter was referred to the Committee of Eleven on Postponed Matters, History.com states. Delegates at that convention loved the electoral college plan, allegedly, because it reconciled differing state and federal interests, allowed people to still have a say in the election, and allowed states with fewer people to still have a say in choosing the president. The Constitution provided states with the same number of electors as the combined total of its membership in the Senate and the House of Representatives. Though we often claim to be a democratic nation, we were intended to be a constitutionally limited representative democratic republic.

Statehood is an important part of our Constitution, and the electoral college honors that idea.

Still, if the people of a state feel that it is fairer to elect a president by popular vote, rather than the electoral college, there is a way around it that would not require a constitutional amendment.

Enter, the National Popular Vote bill. This would guarantee the Presidency to the person that receives the most popular votes. It is ultimately a pact between states. At the state level, our state governments decide to enact into state law a bill that only takes effect once enough states also adopt the law into their own legal code. According to National Popular Vote, 11 states have already enacted the agreement into their own state law. If a few more states join the effort, the electoral college would always mirror the nation’s popular vote.

Eight former national chairs of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) endorsed the National Popular Vote bill pact.

“The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact does not abolish the Electoral College. Instead, it uses the state’s existing authority to change how the Electoral College is chosen, namely from the current winner take all state statutes, to an interstate compact which ensures that the president will be elected by the popular vote of everyone in all 50 states.

It’s perfectly Constitutional, if it’s what we choose to do, because our Constitution gives states exclusive control over the manner of awarding their electoral votes in Article II, Section 1.

“Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors….”

The ALEC chairs said that “the right of states to control their electors in a manner prescribed by their own state legislature is arguably one of the most important authorities granted by the U.S. Constitution. This authority is therefore one of the greatest responsibilities assigned to state legislators. It is undoubtedly in EVERY state’s interest to use this authority to help enact a national popular vote of every vote cast in all 50 states.”

Battleground states are at an unfair advantage because of the way the electoral college works today. Battleground states, according to the ALEC chairs, get seven percent more federal grants than other states, twice as many presidential disaster declarations, and more favoritism in general. Federal policy has been established basically to make swing states happy. For example, the chairs claim that Medicare Part D was designed to win the large senior voting population in Florida at the time.

The issue is that usually, Democrats are affected, so what is the incentive for Red states to join the pact? An editorial in USA Today brings up other issues to consider.

“If the national popular vote were the ultimate decider, candidates would gravitate toward the voter-rich big cities and their suburbs and ignore everyone else. If candidates felt obliged to blanket the entire country with visits and advertising, it would set off a scramble for even more campaign money, leaving candidates more beholden to special interests.”

We should all ask ourselves some serious questions that might cause us to entertain the arguments of people opposing our ideas.

How important is the concept of statehood to Americans today? How important is statehood to you? Does the electoral college still serve its purpose to make sure each state is represented as a member of the Union?

Would the United States lose important strengths if states like Utah suddenly had no real input in the choosing the president?

If you believe that the popular vote alone should be respected, you can take action now for future elections. Check the website to see where your state stands on the National Popular Vote efforts. If your state hasn’t joined the compact yet, you can write your legislators and tell them that this is an important issue that is important to you.

Keep in mind the warning issued in USA Today, though.

“The current system is far from ideal, and one idea worth considering is to shift away from winner-take-all in each state to a proportional allocation of electors based on statewide vote totals. But any change to a system that has generally served the nation well for more than two centuries should be both bipartisan and carefully considered.”

You can use the representative government that we have to make sure that the President-elect in 2020 will be the candidate with the most votes at the booths if you are certain that that is what you want.

[Featured Image by Wynn Pointaux/Pixabay/Cropped and resized/CC0 Public Domain]

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