A new proposal led by a coalition of states aims to see that a national popular vote could come soon without the help of Congress. Recently some progress has been made as noted in the recent Ballot Access News article, “National Popular Vote Plan Bill Passes Rhode Island Legislature“. Take a look:
On June 13, the Rhode Island legislature passed SB 346/HB 5575, the National Popular Vote Plan bill. The plan had actually passed in the last session, but the Governor had vetoed it. Rhode Island’s current Governor, Lincoln Chafee, says he supports the Plan. Assuming it is signed into law in Rhode Island, the plan will have passed in ten jurisdictions. The others are California, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Vermont, and Washington.
According to the National Popular Vote advocacy group the progress is even more remarkable:
The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in the entire United States. The bill ensures that every vote, in every state, will matter in every presidential election. The bill has been enacted by 9 jurisdictions possessing 132 electoral votes—49% of the 270 necessary to activate it. The bill has passed a total of 31 legislative chambers in 21 jurisdictions. In the 47–13 vote in the Republican-controlled New York Senate, Republicans supported the bill 21–11, and Democrats supported it 26–2. The bill has been endorsed by 2,124 state legislators.
Here is more information about the proposals according to Every Vote Equal, another advocacy group behind the recent push:
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is an agreement among various states and the District of Columbia to replace their current rules regarding the apportionment of presidential electors with rules guaranteeing the election of the candidate with the most popular votes in all fifty states and the District of Columbia. Coming in the form of an interstate compact, the agreement goes into effect once law in states that together have an absolute majority of votes (at least 270) in the Electoral College. In the next presidential election, those states would award all their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, who would become President by winning a majority of votes in the Electoral College. Until the compact’s conditions are met, all states will award electoral votes in their current manner.
As of May 2013, the compact has been joined by eight states and the District of Columbia (see map). Their 132 combined electoral votes amount to 24.5% of the Electoral College, and 49% of the 270 votes needed for the compact to go into effect. The compact is based on Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution, which gives each state legislature the right to decide how to appoint its own electors. States have chosen various methods of allocation over the years, with regular changes in the nation’s early decades. Today, all but two states (Maine and Nebraska) award all their electoral votes to the candidate with the most popular votes statewide.
Some remain resolutely opposed to the changes and few Republican dominated states have signed up. One article in the local Statesmen Journal that has successfully opposed the passage of the legislation in Oregon had the following criticism:
Consider a state whose elected officials are dominated by one party and whose political culture includes a willingness to subvert the electoral process. Now that state’s electoral votes go to the powerful party in that state, and no amount of electoral fraud would change that. Under the National Popular Vote bill, that state’s operatives would have every incentive to fraudulently increase the margin of votes for their candidate by 1 million or 2 million votes using any of several strategies, which could very easily swing the national popular vote.
Note that each state supervises its own election process; no federal standards are enforced. Note also that many states use machines with which a recount cannot recount individual votes and can only ask again what totals are registered in each machine.
toto says
Foreseeing apocalyptic mythical fraud as a reason for keeping a system where many people’s votes don’t count for anything is not a compelling argument.
The current state-by-state winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes maximizes the incentive and opportunity for fraud, coercion, intimidation, confusion, and voter suppression. A very few people can change the national outcome by adding, changing, or suppressing a small number of votes in one closely divided battleground state. With the current system all of a state’s electoral votes are awarded to the candidate who receives a bare plurality of the votes in each state. The sheer magnitude of the national popular vote number, compared to individual state vote totals, is much more robust against manipulation.
National Popular Vote would limit the benefits to be gained by fraud or voter suppression. One suppressed vote would be one less vote. One fraudulent vote would only win one vote in the return. In the current electoral system, one fraudulent vote could mean 55 electoral votes, or just enough electoral votes to win the presidency without having the most popular votes in the country.
The closest popular-vote election count over the last 130+ years of American history (in 1960), had a nationwide margin of more than 100,000 popular votes. The closest electoral-vote election in American history (in 2000) was determined by 537 votes, all in one state, when there was a lead of 537,179 (1,000 times more) popular votes nationwide.
For a national popular vote election to be as easy to switch as 2000, it would have to be two hundred times closer than the 1960 election–and, in popular-vote terms, forty times closer than 2000 itself.
Which system offers vote suppressors or fraudulent voters a better shot at success for a smaller effort?
toto says
There is nothing incompatible between differences in state election laws and the concept of a national popular vote for President.
With National Popular Vote, the popular-vote count from each state would be added up to obtain the nationwide total for each candidate.
Under the current system, the electoral votes from all 50 states are comingled and simply added together, irrespective of the fact that the electoral-vote outcome from each state was affected by differences in state policies, including voter registration, ex-felon voting, hours of voting, amount and nature of advance voting, and voter identification requirements.
Current federal law (Title 3, chapter 1, section 6 of the United States Code) requires the states to report the November popular vote numbers (the “canvas”) in what is called a “Certificate of Ascertainment.” They list the electors and the number of votes cast for each. The Congress meets in joint session to count the electoral votes reported in the Certificates of Ascertainment. You can see the Certificates of Ascertainment for all 50 states and the District of Columbia containing the official count of the popular vote at the NARA web site.
Under both the current system and the National Popular Vote compact, all of the people of the United States are impacted by the different election policies of the states. Everyone in the United States is affected by the division of electoral votes generated by each state. The procedures governing presidential elections in a closely divided battleground state (e.g., Florida and Ohio) can affect, and indeed have affected, the ultimate outcome of national elections.
For example, the 2000 Certificate of Ascertainment (required by federal law) from the state of Florida reported 2,912,790 popular votes for George W. Bush and 2,912,253 popular vote for Al Gore, and also reported 25 electoral votes for George W. Bush and 0 electoral votes for Al Gore. That 25–0 division of the electoral votes from Florida determined the outcome of the national election just as a particular division of the popular vote from a particular state might decisively affect the national outcome in some future election under the National Popular Vote compact.
The U.S. Constitution specifically permits diversity of election laws among the states because it explicitly gives the states control over the conduct of presidential elections (article II) as well as congressional elections (article I). The fact is that the Founding Fathers in the U.S. Constitution permit states to conduct elections in varied ways. The National Popular Vote compact is patterned directly after existing federal law and preserves state control of elections and requires each state to treat as “conclusive” each other state’s “final determination” of its vote for President.
fyi . . . In 1969, The U.S. House of Representatives voted for a national popular vote by a 338–70 margin. It was endorsed by Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and various members of Congress who later ran for Vice President and President such as then-Congressman George H.W. Bush, and then-Senator Bob Dole.
toto says
Elections carry the risk of conflicts over recounts.
The current presidential election system makes a repeat of 2000 more likely, not less likely. All you need is a thin and contested margin in a single state with enough electoral votes to make a difference. It’s much less likely that the national vote will be close enough that voting irregularities in a single area will swing enough net votes to make a difference. If we’d had National Popular Vote in 2000, a recount in Florida would not have been an issue.
The idea that recounts will be likely and messy with National Popular Vote is distracting.
The 2000 presidential election was an artificial crisis created because of Bush’s lead of 537 popular votes in Florida. Gore’s nationwide lead was 537,179 popular votes (1,000 times larger). Given the miniscule number of votes that are changed by a typical statewide recount (averaging only 274 votes); no one would have requested a recount or disputed the results in 2000 if the national popular vote had controlled the outcome. Indeed, no one (except perhaps almanac writers and trivia buffs) would have cared that one of the candidates happened to have a 537-vote margin in Florida.
Recounts are far more likely in the current system of state-by-state winner-take-all methods.
The possibility of recounts should not even be a consideration in debating the merits of a national popular vote. No one has ever suggested that the possibility of a recount constitutes a valid reason why state governors or U.S. Senators, for example, should not be elected by a popular vote.
The question of recounts comes to mind in connection with presidential elections only because the current system so frequently creates artificial crises and unnecessary disputes.
We do and would vote state by state. Each state manages its own election and is prepared to conduct a recount.
The state-by-state winner-take-all system is not a firewall, but instead causes unnecessary fires.
“It’s an arsonist itching to burn down the whole neighborhood by torching a single house.” Hertzberg
Given that there is a recount only once in about 160 statewide elections, and given there is a presidential election once every four years, one would expect a recount about once in 640 years with the National Popular Vote. The actual probability of a close national election would be even less than that because recounts are less likely with larger pools of votes.
The average change in the margin of victory as a result of a statewide recount was a mere 296 votes in a 10-year study of 2,884 elections.
No recount would have been warranted in any of the nation’s 57 previous presidential elections if the outcome had been based on the nationwide count.
The common nationwide date for meeting of the Electoral College has been set by federal law as the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December. With both the current system and the National Popular Vote, all counting, recounting, and judicial proceedings must be conducted so as to reach a “final determination” prior to the meeting of the Electoral College. In particular, the U.S. Supreme Court has made it clear that the states are expected to make their “final determination” six days before the Electoral College meets.
Adrian Tawfik says
Thanks for the lengthly comments, its good to hear you like the idea too. It seems pretty positive for everyone. I know where I live in NYC, I have never seen Presidential candidates do anything but raise money. They aren’t campaigning in Harlem or the South Bronx. The same is true for Texas and anyone else in the big states. Really the central point is that we are a democracy of 320 people not 50 states.