National Popular Vote

Seen in Sunday’s Courant:

Connecticut, to everyone’s surprise, was in play during the Super Tuesday primaries. Three major candidates visited the state.

But that may not happen in the run-up to the November general election (minus a quick fundraising visit or two to Fairfield County). If, say, the state is considered safe for the Democrats, neither candidate will feel the need to campaign here. The same thing is likely to happen in two-thirds of the other states.

Our system of electing the president and vice president is flawed and archaic. There is a way to change it without amending the U.S. Constitution. The states can simply agree to give their electoral votes — regardless of who wins each state’s popular vote — to the winner of the national popular vote. There is a serious proposal to adopt the “National Popular Vote” plan here and across the country. It’s worth supporting.

I’ve previously expressed reservations about relying too heavily on popular vote counts (especially given our apparent inability to accurately count votes). In an ideal world, I’d prefer to see other reforms to the election process, rather than a Popular Vote compact.

Those other reforms, unfortunately, are somewhat obscure, and likely lack the sexiness that would facilitate passage.

The NPV compact looks like it might be a bit more achievable than any other idea that I’ve heard…so I’d encourage any state legislator looking at such a measure during this legislative term to at least consider it.

While the editorial mentions that some state officials (specifically California’s Governator Schwarzenegger) might object to the notion that their state’s electoral votes would go towards a candidate who didn’t win in that state…the fact of the matter is that signing up for the multistate compact is only really saying “we believe the popular vote should determine the winner of the presidency, without the games played with the Electoral College”.

Heck, one of the things that has been refreshing when watching Hillary and Obama battling it out since Super Tuesday is that every state seems to matter. That’s causing many people to become engaged in the political process and to care a bit more about what’s going on in the world around them.

That has got to be a good thing, right?

Seen on the Boston Globe op-ed pages:

A bill pending before the Massachusetts House of Representatives and 47 other legislatures across the country would fix this by changing the Electoral College so that it reflects the votes of every person in all 50 states.

The plan would ensure that the candidate who wins the popular vote in all 50 states would be elected president. It would ensure that every person’s vote would be equally important, and that our leaders would be accountable to the nation as a whole, not just voters in a handful of battleground states.

The consequences of this broken system are dire: voter participation rates are among the lowest in the world, partisan mischief runs rampant in battleground states, and, of course, a candidate with fewer votes can be elected president. Four times in 55 elections the candidate who placed second in the popular vote has won the contest. In five of the last 12 presidential elections, a switch of a handful of votes in one or two states would have elected the candidate who did not receive the most popular votes nationwide.

I’m still leery of relying wholly on the popular vote, given our apparent inability to count votes in certain jurisdictions… but the focusing of the contest on battleground states, and the localized dirty tricks I would agree are downsides of the current system which ought to be ended.