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National Popular Vote (NPV) in Michigan and Georgia

Posted by JOE WINDISH, Technology Editor in Politics.
Dec 16th, 2008 | Comments

The National Popular Vote (NPV) is a campaign encouraging states to enact legislation that would give their electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes nationwide. That would ensure the candidate with the most popular votes nationally wins the election. The change will take place once states with at least 270 electoral votes, the minimum needed by a presidential candidate to win, pass the legislation.

On the same day the senate failed to bail out the auto industry, Michigan became the twenty-second legislative chamber to vote for the NPV, with Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, and New Jersey enacting it into law. Nathan Newman:

Michigan House Republicans provided almost a third of those votes, recognizing that under the Electoral College system, their national party counterparts were essentially abandoning them.

As Michigan state leaders argued, the point of a popular vote for President is not just for the abstract democratic principle of assuring that the popular winner become President; it’s to encourage candidates to fight for every vote in every state and never to have a reason to ignore their concerns. Majority floor leader Steve Tobocman, the main sponsor of the bill, noted:

“The [National Popular Vote] also will discourage candidates from ignoring so-called ‘fly-over states.’ John McCain bailed out of Michigan and Barack Obama pulled out of North Dakota for one reason: those electoral votes were out of reach.”

Michigan Republican leaders were primed to vote for the NPV, worried that national party leaders would begin ignoring state concerns after McCain lost the Great Lakes states. In Georgia, where Obama made an unsuccessful push to win this year, it’s the Democrats moving NPV forward:

Atlanta area lawmakers plan to push legislation next year calling for the popular vote —- rather than the Electoral College —- to decide who wins presidential elections.

State Sen. Nan Orrock (D-Atlanta) and Rep. Stephanie Stuckey-Benfield (D-Atlanta) announced the legislation on the same day members of the Electoral College met in Atlanta and across the country to formally cast the ballots that will elect Barack Obama president.

“Now is the time to move popular-vote legislation onto the front burner,” Orrock said at a Capitol news conference. “This is a nonpartisan issue. This is an issue about expanding democracy.” [...]

“The current system allows the needs and interests of Georgia to be ignored,” Stuckey-Benfield said. “If we had a national popular vote, then every vote would be equal and candidates would campaign for every vote.

Facing South notes that FairVote proposals have passed one legislature house in about 20 states so far. And a recent FairVote study finds that:

98 percent of the campaign events involving the 2008 presidential or vice presidential candidates occurred in 15 “battleground states.”
Over half of the events were in just four states: Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

The electoral college is an artifact whose time has passed. This is a state-based plan that makes good sense to me.

DLS

Why not just go to direct election of the President, and abolish the Vice Presidency or make it an appointed position?

adelinesdad

DLS, because that would require a change the US constitution, which requires the electoral college. By enacting the laws at the state level that essentially work within the electoral college system (to the end of circumventing the system), no change to the US constitution is needed so it would be easier to get passed. But the end result would be equivalent to a direct election of the President.

adelinesdad

In principle I support the NPV effort, but there a couple of logistical concerns that would need to be worked out:

1) If the vote were close enough at the national level to be within the margin of error, there would be pandemonium. Can you imagine a national re-count? It's true that it would be very unlikely to happen, but we'd need to consider the possibility. One thing that would be nice is to come up with ways to ensure a more accurate count in the first place.

2) We'd have to re-think how third-party candidates would play into the system. Today, even if a third party got 10% of the vote, they would be unlikely to win any state, so the winning candidate would still get over 50% of the electoral college. However, if we went to a NPV system, that 10% could cause the winning candidate to get less than 50% of the national vote, which would now be the vote that mattered. I would not be comfortable handing the presidency someone who got 45% of the vote, versus someone else that got 44%. And a national run-off would probably be out of the question. Perhaps the solution would be a "second choice" vote, but getting all of the states to agree on that is another issue.

In summary, before we get rid of the electoral college too hastily, let's remember that there were logistical problems that it solved, which would need to be solved in other ways.

PJBFan

I am opposed to the idea of the NPV. The Electoral College was designed as a check against the popular will in the selection of the President. It has, occasionally, 1998 being the most recent time I can think of, been used to register protests and to try blocking the popular will. There is no right to vote for the President, in fact, the states may rescind the popular vote on the Presidency at any time.

Let us not break with the founders who felt that the People would have far too much power, and the states far too little, if the President was popularly elected.

mvy

state-by-state winner-take-all system is not a firewall, but instead causes unnecessary fires.

Under the current system, there are 51 separate vote pools in every presidential election. Thus, our nation’s 55 presidential elections have really been 2,084 separate elections. This is the reason why there have been five seriously disputed counts in the nation’s 55 presidential elections. The 51 separate pools regularly create artificial crises in elections in which the vote is not at all close on a nationwide basis, but close in particular states.

If anyone is genuinely concerned about the possibility of recounts, then a single national pool of votes is the way to drastically reduce the likelihood of recounts and eliminate the artificial crises produced by the current system.

mvy

Under the current system of electing the President, no state requires that a presidential candidate receive anything more than a plurality of the 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.

mvy

The people vote for President now in all 50 states and have done so in most states for 200 years.

So, the issue raised by the National Popular Vote legislation is not about whether there will be "mob rule" in presidential elections, but whether the "mob" in a handful of closely divided battleground states, such as Florida, get disproportionate attention from presidential candidates, while the "mobs" of the vast majority of states are ignored. In 2004, candidates spent over two thirds of their visits and two-thirds of their money in just 6 states and 99% of their money in just 16 states, while ignoring the rest of the country.

The current system does NOT provide some kind of check on the "mobs." There have been 22,000 electoral votes cast since presidential elections became competitive (in 1796), and only 10 have been cast for someone other than the candidate nominated by the elector's own political party. The electors are dedicated party activists who meet briefly in mid-December to cast their totally predictable votes in accordance with their pre-announced pledges.

superdestroyer

NPV is just a method of speeding up the process of the U.S. becoming a one party state. If NPV is adopted, the real election will of course be in the Democratic primary. Given that is a candidate wins both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary they will be the sure winner, that leaves the over 48 states with little to no influence.

Do the people in Michigan or Georgia really believe they will have any influence in the coming one party state when the Preisdnet is really elected between the Iowa caucues and the super tuesday primarie?

DLS

Adeline's Dad: But look at the obvious intent motivating this "national vote" effort, which is obviously to subvert the Electoral College's intent and substitute a de facto direct election for what was sought with the de jure system. It's childish and cowardly to behave in this subversive manner instead of openly and honestly announcing and seeking what activists truly desire.

DLS

PJB Fan: It's politically incorrect, but a superior way of getting a President would be to have the Governors elect the person through an approval vote. (It's expecting too much of others, sadly, to seek the approval vote -- better than plurality and lower-grade substitutes like instant runoff voting -- for single-person offices, much less to require the most intelligent, mathematically derived "maximal strategy" from every voter.) Having the Governors elect the President (ideally by approval voting) would be a welcome innovation, in fact.

Sadly, the trend is such that we cannot reform direct election of Senators, who should be super-ambassadors of their respective states.

It raises the issue of what the modern concept should be of the states in our federal system (which has been treated with contempt along with constitutional details systematically and generally since the 1930s) and ideally, extending to metropolitan area government (which should be outside-in given the wisdom we have acquired over decades -- failed central cities should be subject to suburban oversight and management, not vice versa!).

adelinesdad

DLS, if you are saying that you think the activists are trying to mask their true intentions, I don't agree. They clearly want a national popular vote, and are using a loop-hole in the constitution to try to make it happen without the need for an amendment.

So if you believed something would be beneficial to the country, and you could achieve that by exploiting a loop-hole in the system, you would choose not to do that and try to make it happen in a more difficult manner? I can see arguments for both sides on this. On the face of it, you might say: of course, it's the only honorable thing to do to do it the right way. On the other hand, if you believe what you are trying to do would benefit the country, and the way things currently are is detrimental to the country, wouldn't choosing the more difficult path mean purposefully delaying the progress of the country? It's another way to say "the ends justify the means". So I see your point about doing things in a more straight-forward manner, but it's debatable.

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