(Via Election Law Blog) The Sacramento Bee is running an article on an interesting measure
moving through the California state legislature:
Six years after Democrat Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the presidency to Republican George W. Bush, there’s a
new move afoot in the California Legislature and other states to ensure that such things never happen again.The linchpin is a proposed “interstate compact,” designed to guarantee that presidents will be selected by popular vote, without
amending the U.S. Constitution or eliminating the Electoral College.[...]AB 2948 would commit California to a compact in which each participating state would cast all its electoral votes for the
presidential candidate receiving the most popular votes nationwide.The compact would not become effective until its member states control a majority of the Electoral College’s 538 votes.[...]
Besides California, legislation to create a compact was introduced this year in Colorado, Missouri, Illinois and
Louisiana
The article includes a discussion on the pros and cons of such a measure. By moving to a popular-vote driven system, you erode the
phenomenon of a handful of “battleground” states being courted intensely in each election cycle in the hopes of garnering the
deciding electoral votes from those states. However, you also lose the protection granted by the College that the winning
candidate must have multi-region support.
I’ll admit that I’m a fan of the Electoral College because of the multi-region aspect…although I’d personally redesign it so that
the country is divided up into some number of districts, drawn in a non-gerrymandered manner and blind to state lines; rather than
going the winner-take-all routine followed in 48 out of 50 states.
If the compact ever did come into force, there certainly would be changes. In close races, the campaigns would turn into drives to
“get out the vote” which would boost turnout results nicely….which may or may not be a good thing depending on how you view the
idea of someone who doesn’t care enough to educate him/herself on the candidates and issues from going to the polls out of peer
pressure.
I also wonder if presidential election campaigns would turn into even bigger money-fests because of a rendering of the electoral
college as moot. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a better-balance of campaign focus would be achieved by increasing spending in
non-battleground states without necessarily reducing battleground spending.
This could be interesting to watch.