1. NO uniform definition of Elector-Voter in the NPV scheme from Hell.

2. I still say this is a back-alley attempt to abolish the Electoral College.

3. National Popular Vote is a nonpartisan coalition of legislators, scholars, constitutionalists and grassroots activists committed to preserving the Electoral College, while guaranteeing the presidency to the candidate who earns the most votes in all fifty states.

   The National Popular Vote bill preserves the constitutionally mandated Electoral College and state control of elections. It changes the way electoral votes are awarded by states in the Electoral College, instead of the current 48 state-by-state winner-take-all system (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but since enacted by 48 states).

   The candidate with the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC would get the 270+ Electoral College votes from the enacting states. That majority of Electoral College votes guarantees the candidate with the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC wins the presidency.

4. Why not simply abolish winner-take-all presidential elections state by state?

5. Why not simply abolish winner-take-all presidential elections state by state?

   +1. With more and more primaries moving away from winner-take-all, I think progress in this direction could be made for the general election.

   Also, with a national popular vote, imagine having to recount votes and go through legal challenges ACROSS THE ENTIRE COUNTRY in 2000, not just Florida. We wouldn’t have had a president for two years probably.

6. An analysis of the whole number proportional plan and congressional district systems of awarding electoral votes, evaluated the systems “on the basis of whether they promote majority rule, make elections more nationally competitive, reduce incentives for partisan machinations, and make all votes count equally. . . .

   Awarding electoral votes by a proportional or congressional district method fails to promote majority rule, greater competitiveness or voter equality. Pursued at a state level, both reforms dramatically increase incentives for partisan machinations. If done nationally, the congressional district system has a sharp partisan tilt toward the Republican Party, while the whole number proportional system sharply increases the odds of no candidate getting the majority of electoral votes needed, leading to the selection of the president by the U.S. House of Representatives.

   For states seeking to exercise their responsibility under the U.S. Constitution to choose a method of allocating electoral votes that best serves their state’s interest and that of the national interest, both alternatives fall far short of the National Popular Vote plan, a third reform option which is under consideration in a number of state.

   http://www.fairvote.org/fuzzy-math-wrong-way-reforms-for-allocating-electoral-college-votes

7. 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.

   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 56 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.

8. 2 –

   Since the states agreeing the NPV interstate compact would still “send their electors” to the Electoral College, the compact hardly abolishes the EC. States agreeing the compact will continue to participate in the EC, and the state legislatures of those states will still be allocating their electors in the manner of their choosing – in other words, in a manner which is perfectly consistent with the provisions of the US Constitution.

   5 –

   This is a favorite myth perpetuated by opponents of the NPV compact. Many states’ recount processes are automatically triggered, by their own laws, depending on the disparity in votes…but only within their own borders. Nothing in the NPV compact requires member states to change those laws, and NPV certainly can’t require states which do not agree the compact to change their laws. So, if the NPV compact is put into effect there is no reason why states would need to recount their own votes if the disparity within their own borders does not trigger a recount. For example, if the national popular vote differential is less than 1%, and the difference in the votes in a particular state is 8 or 9%, and that state’s election laws require a recount when the difference is less than, say, 5%, there is no practical or legal reason for a recount to occur within that state.

   Only those who advance the false argument that the NPV compact somehow violates the “sacred” principle of federalism use the specter of a nationwide recount as a scare tactic. Don’t fall for it.

   And while we’re on the subject of recounts, perhaps someone would like to make the case for what is so damned wrong about conducting recounts in order to ensure that the real winner of an election is identified? We’re not exactly ordering a few Big Macs and a bag of fries, here. Election results don’t get greasy as they cool off.

   We’ve had 12 years to address the shortcomings of our polling and vote counting processes. Not doing so, motivated by the illusion that somehow our current implementation of the EC protects us from recounts, would be foolish. After all, 2000 did occur. So did 1876. And the EC didn’t prevent either of those fiascoes, did it?

   In fact, one can just as easily argue that had the NPV been in effect in 2000, there might have been none of the protracted legal actions that ensued. Orderly recounts would have established Gore as the clear winner of the election (sorry, Republicans). Similarly, Kerry could easily have contested the 2004 election since Ohio turned the election for Bush, and there was widespread electoral fraud in that state. But he didn’t, for whatever reason. Maybe he had a Botox injection and a haircut scheduled immediately following election day and couldn’t be bothered. But…had the NPV been in effect in 2004, there would have been no reason to contest the results in Ohio or any other state, because Bush won by a clear margin in the national popular vote count (sorry, Democrats).

9. 7 –

   Good post. I began writing mine before yours was posted, and we seem to have made some similar points.

10. How many of the usual suspect States will be having the following voting for a Prez/VP —

    Children
    Felons
    Mentally ill
    Foreigners
    Aliens from Outer Space — esp. in CA.
    Animals and Plants — they got rights too.
    ——-
    Regardless of ALL of the usual suspect MORONS with their EVIL NPV scheme from Hell —

    Abolish the timebomb Electoral College.
    Uniform definition of Election in ALL of the U.S.A. — including the colonies, D.C., etc.
    P.R. and nonpartisan App.V. — pending head to head math

11. #7 The study ‘Statewide Election Recounts, 2000-2009’ by Rob Richie and Emily Hellman which you base your arguments is fundamentally flawed.

    It essentially uses statewide elections as models for national presidential election. (eg if 2% of the statewide elections are recountably close, then 2% of the presidential elections will recountable close). But if they were valid models, then a very large number of presidential elections would be blowouts.

    But we do have a small sample (46) of actual presidential elections and they simply do not fit the statewide model.

    By Richie’s flawed reasoning, the 1880 presidential election was simply an anomaly because races for RRC in Texas between a Republican and Libertarian are never very close.

12. #3 What is to prevent someone registering as “mvymvy” in one State, as “Susan” in another, and as “oldgulph” in a 3rd, to get 3 votes?

13. #12, people can already do that now. Someone can move to one state and vote early for President. Then move to another state next week, register there, and again vote for President. Etc.

    Technically, as long as that voter could claim he or she switched domiciles in rapid succession, it is not illegal.

14. 13 –

    I think the correct answer is “massive traffic jams on the interstate highway system.”

    In any event, the EC as it is presently utilized does not prevent that kind of voter fraud 12 posits.

    Just another anti-NPV red herring.

15. What’ so bad about having the House select the President? After all, that was the original intent. The Framers assumed this would happen on a regular basis.

16. #15 Indeed. The intent of the Framers was that the Congress would be the preeminent branch of government. This is why representatives were elected by the People, and senators by the legislatures of the States that formed the compact.

    While they weren’t so coarse as to refer to judges as “unelected people”, as some later supposed constitutional authorities have, they did intend for the judicial branch to be more like a referee.

17. #7

    No recount would have been warranted in any of the nation’s 56 previous presidential elections if the outcome had been based on the nationwide count.

    What was the margin of victory in 1880? Is it not true that there were individual congressional results that were contested and had more votes changed, than the margin of victory in the “nationwide count” for president.

18. #4 There is nothing to prevent a State from unilaterally appointing its electors on the basis of votes cast in other states.

    There are four possible combinations between a statewide popular vote winner (SPV), the national popular vote winner (NPV), and the national electoral vote winner (NEV).

    If the SPV, NPV, and NEV winners were the same, they would vote just as they do now.

    If the SPV winner was not the NPV and NEV winner, then the state’s electors would vote for the president, and win the state admiration for its consensual support of the nation’s choice.

    If the SPV and NEV winner were the same, but the NPV winner was different, then there is a strong possibility that the national result would be different (“correct”). For example, in 1960, if Illinois(27), New Jersey(16), Massachusetts(16), Rhode Island(4), and Hawaii(3) had cast their electoral votes for the national popular vote winner, then Richard Nixon would have been elected in 1960.

    In 1876, Illinois(21), Massachusetts(13), California(6), Vermont(5), and Rhode Island(4) would have assured the election of Sam Tilden.

    If the SPV and NPV winner were the same, but the NEV winner was different, then there would be no change in the state’s vote.

    So in no case would a unilateral State be worse off than it is now, and it would like gain the admiration of the People.

19. 16 –

    Good question. Here’s what G. Morris, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, said in response to delegates Randolph’s and Pinckney’s request for “an explanation & discussion of the reasons for changing the mode of electing the Executive :”

    ———————-

    The 1st. was the danger of intrigue & faction if the appointmt. should be made by the Legislature.

    2. The inconveniency of an ineligibility required by that mode in order to lessen its evils.

    3. The difficulty of establishing a Court of Impeachments, other than the Senate which would not be so proper for the trial nor the other branch for the impeachment of the President, if appointed by the Legislature,

    4. No body had appeared to be satisfied with an appointment by the Legislature.

    5. Many were anxious even for an immediate choice by the people.

    6. The indispensible necessity of making the Executive independent of the Legislature.

    As the Electors would vote at the same time throughout the U. S. and at so great a distance from each other, the great evil of cabal was avoided. It would be impossible also to corrupt them. A conclusive reason for making the Senate instead of the Supreme Court the Judge of impeachments, was that the latter was to try the President after the trial of the impeachment.

    ————————

    These comments are taken from Madison’s notes. Source: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/debates_904.asp

20. 16 –

    One other point. If you could resurrect any one of the delegates to the Con Con and show them how the Executive branch has evolved over time and the tremendous power it has accreted by law, by fiat, and by abject concession by the legislative branch of our government, he would likely be horrified by what he would see. For instance, we have an entire body of agency law now that he never would have contemplated in 1787, and the thought of the Executive committing fighting forces in a war undeclared by Congress would likely also be anethema to him.

    Note the use of the word “likely.” These are only my opinions. I can’t test them by asking any of the Founding Fathers what they might think of how we choose to run our country now. They are, after all, long since dead.

    What we can do is read the words they put to paper, and the fact is that they left the decision as to how to allocate electors to the state legislatures. Legislatures signing on to the NPV compact are merely exercising that right and responsibility to do so in a manner of their choosing.

21. “while the whole number proportional system sharply increases the odds of no candidate getting the majority of electoral votes needed, leading to the selection of the president by the U.S. House of Representatives.”

    And I’m okay with that. Essentially if you endorse the NPV, you’re also endorsing the first-past-the-post system that we have, but personally I don’t think any candidate gaining 35% of the vote should automatically earn an office without any runoff or further rounds of voting. At least in US presidential elections as they currently stand, if the plurality candidate gains far below 50% of the popular vote, Congress will determine the winner (& hopefully make an informed decision with perhaps 2nd place getting the Vice Presidency).

22. (2nd place VP candidate that is)

23. #19 Maybe Congress should elect the President from among the governors for a two-year term, with no consecutive terms, and a limit of 3 terms total.

    This eliminates the problem #2, lessens the need for #3 or the risk of #1. #5 increases the likelihood of further aggrandizement of presidential power.

    #6 Has resulted in an executive that is too independent of the legislature or the States. Federal revenues should be limited to 10% of GDP.

24. 21 –

    Since 1860, when all states began using popular vote totals to allocate their electoral college votes, there have been 37 presidential elections. Of those, the winner had a majority of popular votes in 24 elections. 9 other winners polled between 47% and 50%. 4 winners had between 40 and 46%, and in only one instance (Lincoln’s first election) did the winner poll less than 40% (39.8).

    Source: http://www.100bestwebsites.org/alt/evmaps/electoral-maps.htm

    There can be a credible concern of a candidate today winning the election with less than 40% only if a third party mounts a credible candidacy. Given the fact that our two party system is now deeply entrenched and not about to cede any of its power with any meaningful campaign finance reform, the likelihood of that happening is virtually nil.

25. 24 – I’m aware of all of that, but third party campaigns do gain traction – see 1992 (had Perot not dropped out and come back in, the winner likely would have had under 40%). I’m shocked that your only rebuttal to this is historical statistics and that basically you have no philosophical justification for endorsing a position that is antithetical to reform of first-past-the-post, or justification for 40% being as good as a majority. 40% is not 50%. For NPV to work well/not be seen as a farce, you have to have the two party system stay as it is. While that’s likely to be the case for some time, if you support an entrenched two party system, then what exactly bring you to this site?

26. *brings

27. 25 –

    Whoa, hold on there, friend. I did not say I supported an entrenched two party system. I merely acknowledged its existence. Do you deny it?

    I also did not say that NPV is a solution to the challenge of making third parties viable in this country. I do believe that it is a way, short of constitutional amendments (and without being being what opponents of NPV call a “back-door amendment”) of ensuring that every American’s vote for president has as much weight as any others. Surely you understand that the current winner-take all EC implementation effectively disenfranchises millions of voters who happen to live in uncontested deep blue and deep red states?

    I also have not said on this site, to the best of my recollection, that I am opposed to any other useful reforms of our electoral process to ensure:

    – free, unfettered access to the polls,
    – safe, fair and clean elections and ballot tabulation, including paper record trails
    – uniform ballots and ballot processing
    – equal access to the electoral process by third, fourth, fifth…etc. parties

    On the last point, it’s my feeling that the major impediment to the success of third parties has nothing to do with the manner in which we tabulate results. It has to do with campaign finance, as I said above. Under our current system of financing campaigns, it will be virtually impossible for a third party to grow at the local state and federal levels to the point where it will be able to mount a credible challenge against what some on this site call “the duopoly.” This is one of the reasons I found the Citizens v. United decision so repugnant. For every super-rich individual or CEO you find to support a third party candidate, they will find many, many others to support a Democrat or a Republican. It’s not voting procedures and ballot tabulation methodologies that are “entrenching” the duopoly – it’s a sea of cash being spent by the filthy rich and the super powerful.

    I dispute your assertion that NPV could not “work well” in a political environment which would hypothetically include a viable third party. You are wrong in asserting, if I understand you correctly, that the Congress would settle an election if the “plurality” dropped below a certain threshold. Not a plurality of popular votes. A majority of EC votes (which is the actual constitutional requirement for election) can just as easily be achieved and an election “work just as well” using the NPV system as the current EC implementation.

    If you have a philosophical objection to a candidate winning with less than 50%, I wonder how you could support anything BUT a two party system, the only system in which a majority winner is guaranteed? I have no problem with a candidate winning an election with any margin of plurality. So perhaps that’s just a difference of opinion we have.

    Finally, NPV is clearly not the only solution to the weaknesses and failings inherent in our current system of electing our president, nor is it a panacea. I recognize that and have never said that it is. But it is an improvement, in my opinion, in that it solves the problem of systematic disenfranchisement of tens of millions of voters every four years. Also in my opinion, it is a viable improvement (unlike the suggestion in 23 above, for instance). It can be implemented, whereas other suggestions would require a constitutional amendment, a very unlikely proposition. But…it is not an option which is mutually exclusive with respect to other possible improvements which I would also support – enthusiastically – and on which you and I might agree.

28. I suppose it is a difference of opinion on plurality. It just strikes me that NPV assumes America is okay with the first round plurality winning automatically, and rather than having any contingency for that not being the consensus, you have to just cross your fingers and hope that there’s a duopoly as long as the NPV is in place. A year in which a runoff of some form (whether in Congress or at the polls) might change the winner could be rather embarrassing to NPV. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like winner-take-all states, but I think progress could be made towards convincing states to do something different rather than simply pooling their results and trading disenfranchisement of one kind for another. I’d like to see proportional +2, ie, proportional house electors, winner of a state gets 2 senate electors.

29. With the current system of electing the President, no state requires that a presidential candidate receive anything more than the most popular votes in order to receive all of the state’s electoral votes.

    Not a single legislative bill has been introduced in any state legislature in recent decades (among the more than 100,000 bills that are introduced in every two-year period by the nation’s 7,300 state legislators) proposing to change the existing universal practice of the states to award electoral votes to the candidate who receives a plurality (as opposed to absolute majority) of the votes (statewide or district-wide). There is no evidence of any public sentiment in favor of imposing such a requirement.

    If an Electoral College type of arrangement were essential for avoiding a proliferation of candidates and people being elected with low percentages of the vote, we should see evidence of these conjectured apocalyptic outcomes in elections that do not employ such an arrangement. In elections in which the winner is the candidate receiving the most votes throughout the entire jurisdiction served by that office, historical evidence shows that there is no massive proliferation of third-party candidates and candidates do not win with small percentages. For example, in 905 elections for governor in the last 60 years, the winning candidate received more than 50% of the vote in over 91% of the elections. The winning candidate received more than 45% of the vote in 98% of the elections. The winning candidate received more than 40% of the vote in 99% of the elections. No winning candidate received less than 35% of the popular vote.

    Since 1824 there have been 16 presidential elections in which a candidate was elected or reelected without gaining a majority of the popular vote.– including Lincoln (1860), Wilson (1912, and 1916), Truman (1948), Kennedy (1960), Nixon (1968), and Clinton (1992 and 1996).

    And, FYI, with the current system, it could only take winning a plurality of the popular vote in the 11 most populous states, containing 56% of the population of the United States, for a candidate to win the Presidency — that is, a mere 26% of the nation’s votes.

    Americans do not view the absence of run-offs in the current system as a major problem. If, at some time in the future, the public demands run-offs, that change can be implemented at that time.

30. 28 –

    We probably agree on more than might appear at first blush.

    Although there are differing opinions on the effects of IRV tallying methodologies on third parties’ chances in elections, I’m not opposed to it and in fact favor it. I do believe that if the NPV compact is ultimately agreed and put into effect, it could cause a further reform in the manner of electing presidents. Once the Electoral College becomes, in effect, a pro forma acknowledgement of the winner of the popular vote (yes, by plurality), there might then be more widespread interest in electoral reform, ditching the anachronistic EC entirely and moving on to something more sensible than EITHER the EC as it is employed now, or the NPV utilization of the EC. Absent the NPV compact, thuogh, it appears that we are stuck with the current implementation of the EC for a variety of reasons, chief among them being that it would be impossible to achieve major reform by amending the Constitution. Put NPV into place, and perhaps we can have a better, national discussion about how we want to elect our presidents in this century…the century with modern polling science, electronic communication, myriad possibilities for ballot tabulation and verification, and an Executive branch that wields an almost infinite excess of power, at least as the Founding Fathers would probably see it if they could be resurrected. At that point we might be able to discard NPV entirely and move on to something better, and I would welcome that since I don’t think NPV is perfect.

    But without the impetus of NPV, I don’t see major reform as being any more possible than it has been with the many amendment proposals which have been made in the past. For the most part those have been no more than political posturing.

    Thanks for the response.

    29 – Good post. Thanks.

31. 29 – Not a single legislative bill has been introduced in any state legislature in recent decades (among the more than 100,000 bills that are introduced in every two-year period by the nation’s 7,300 state legislators) proposing to change the existing universal practice of the states to award electoral votes to the candidate who receives a plurality

    Can you produce a source for this? Last year BAN ran articles about a proposed change to electoral college in the Pennsylvania legislature, while in I believe 2004 Colorado’s legislature almost changed to a proportional voting system for its 9 EC votes. Now, if you’re speaking in terms of the 48 states that use winner-take-all, then you may be right; probably none of them have entertained the notion of any kind of runoff. It’s odd that even Louisiana, which has the “jungle primary” and runoff system for other offices, doesn’t want to have runoff in the presidential election, but that’s probably because if you’re the only state doing a presidential election runoff, and if that decides the race, the results are obviously going to be skewed and corruption may be invited. It’s probably almost a form of peer pressure states apply to themselves; no states wants to step forward and have voting after early November. That’s where #30 may be right about NPV changing the culture, who knows. If it does pass I can only hope it will also change voting systems.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.