Former Attorney General Eric Holder calls for the presidency to be decided by the voters:
The National Popular Vote Movement Gains Momentum
Colorado Governor to Sign National Popular Vote Bill
In an interview with The Hill, Governor Jared Polis of Colorado has stated that he will sign the bill, passed last week by the Colorado state legislature, to enter into the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Polis stated that he has “long supported electing the president by who gets the most votes” and noted that the Compact is “a way to move towards direct election of the president.”
Colorado joins eleven other states and the District of Columbia in agreeing to pledge their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote once states with a total of 270 electoral votes join the Compact. After Colorado’s nine votes are added to the total, the Compact will have 181 electoral votes. New Mexico, which has five electoral votes, has passed a similar bill in its state House. The bill is currently awaiting a vote in the state Senate.
The Electoral College and Women
Watch MEVC CEO Reed Hundt explain how the Electoral College, as it currently operates, keeps women from seeing their candidate of choice become president, despite voting at higher rates than men:
The Electoral College Harms African-Americans
Most African-Americans live in the south. Even though the vast majority of African-Americans cast their votes for Democratic candidates presidential elections, many of those votes do not count because of the Electoral College.
Republicans' Small-State Advantage Is an Optical Illusion
Besides the obvious fact that Republicans won 'wrong-winner' victories in 2000 and 2016, one of the main reasons why GOP leaders believe the Electoral College generally helps their candidates is their supposed advantage in small states. That bit of conventional wisdom is not confined just to Republicans. Here's a recent statement from a respected neutral source, the fact-checking website Politifact:
Two factors explain why today’s political environment, if anything, gives Republican states a leg up in the Electoral College. First, smaller states get a disproportionately large impact in the Electoral College, because each state (plus the District of Columbia) gets a guaranteed two electoral votes before the rest of the electoral votes are allotted based on House seats (and thus, indirectly, on population). While there are some smaller blue states, the smallest states are disproportionately Republican-leaning.
Looking at any of the familiar blue-red Electoral College maps from recent elections, it's easy to see why such a perception took hold:
Huge red swaths on the map represent vast, sparsely populated, solidly Republican states—Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas. Blue small states, in contrast, tend to be small in area as well as in population—Hawaii, Vermont, Rhode Island, Delaware, the District of Columbia. They're easy to overlook, so glancing at a map may result in an optical illusion rather than a reliable answer. Instead, let's examine actual numbers from elections over the last three decades:
In four of the last seven elections, the Democratic candidate won more small-state electoral votes than the Republican! Over the same period, the median number of small-state votes won by the two parties is exactly the same—30 each. In the two most recent elections, votes from small states split almost evenly, as they gave a one-vote margin to Obama in 2012 and a two-vote edge to Trump in 2016. In short, the idea that small states reliably give Republicans a leg up in the Electoral College is a myth.
Jack Nagel is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. This is Part II of his series debunking the myths that the Electoral College always benefits Republicans and that the national popular vote would necessarily benefit Democrats. Read Part I here.
Colorado Legislature Passes National Popular Vote Bill
Both chambers of the Colorado legislature have passed the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. If Governor Jared Polis signs the bill, as he has pledged to do, Colorado will join eleven other states and the District of Columbia in agreeing to pledge their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote once states with a total of 270 electoral votes join the Compact. After Colorado’s nine votes are added to the total, the Compact will have 181 electoral votes.
If the Compact becomes effective, it will “eliminat[e] any chance that a candidate can win the presidency without winning the popular vote nationally.”
The New Mexico House has passed a similar bill. It is awaiting a vote by the state’s Senate.
The Electoral College is Bad for Small States
Watch MEVC CEO Reed Hundt explain how, contrary to popular belief, the Electoral College as it currently operates is bad for voters who live in small states:
California Dreaming
But for the electoral college system, would the sort of confrontation reported below between a first-term president and the biggest state be imaginable? I have a dream of one country bound by a national election where every vote was weighed, measured, and counted equally.
WASHINGTON — A day after California filed a lawsuit challenging President Trump’s emergency declaration on the border, the Transportation Department said it was exploring legal options to claw back $2.5 billion in federal funds it had already spent on the state’s high-speed rail network.
The Trump administration also said it was terminating a $929 million federal grant to the California High-Speed Rail Authority, according to a letter the Transportation Department sent Tuesday.
Republicans Should Dislike Winner-Take-All
Democrats use a proportional system to nominate their candidate for president.
But “Republicans tend to use winner-take-all systems that reward candidates who win by even the slimmest margins.” Kamarck at 88-92. This “means that Democratic contests that make it past the early states can go on much longer than Republican contests.”
Proportional systems were favored by “early twentieth-century progressive reformers who saw proportional representation as a way to break the power of big-city political machines.” Proportionality was revived by Democrats in their presidential nominating process in the wake of the divisive 1968 nominating experience.
The result is that Democrats typically attract more attention, more voters register Democratic, Democrats build a big tent and a big base, and Republicans hope that greater control by an elite over the process gives them a candidate who aligns with the wishes of the elite.
In 2015-16 the winner-take-all system greatly helped Donald Trump’s take-over of the Republican party. If the Republicans had used proportionality to choose delegates, Trump would have had a much more difficult time getting so many delegates so early. He might well have won the nomination anyhow, but the theory of an elite controlling the process is now debunked.
By contrast, while using the equitable proportional system almost exclusively since the 1990s, the Democrats have nominated candidates who won the national popular plurality in every general election from 1992 to 2016, with the sole exception of 2004. That is six wins out of seven.
One person, one vote builds a bigger, better, reliable base for a national party.
Slavery Shaped the Electoral College
Here is look at the debates that gave rise to the Electoral College, and how the southern states’ desire to preserve slavery was a driving factor behind our current system (from the Milwaukee Independent).
The Civil Rights Case for the National Vote
Elaine Kamarck explained that in 2004, testifying to a Democratic commission formed to reform the nominating process, Ron Walters, a “veteran of Jesse Jackson’s two presidential campaigns,” described “how difficult it was for African American candidates” to “do well” in the “all-white states of Iowa and New Hampshire.” He said that if “Section 2 [of the Voting Rights Act] suggests that we shouldn’t dilute the voter of minorities,” then putting these two states up-front in the process has “the effect of diluting the black vote.” The reason is that the results in these two states matter more than the results that follow in later states, where the percentage of African-American votes is much higher. Page 79.
The winner-take-all system of allocating electors has the same effect. In states where African-American votes typically are cast for the losing presidential candidate, such as across the states in the former Confederacy, those votes are “diluted.” Indeed, they are systematically discarded.
The only two ways to make those votes matter equally to white votes are to have all states adopt a proportional system of allocating electors according to the popular vote in states OR to have some states allocated some electors to the national winner, thus forcing the candidates to seek a national win based on a one person-one vote principle in order to get enough electors to be president.
The former solution works only if all states adopt it. If all were willing to do that, they might as well simply amend the Constitution by calling for direct election of the president. (Americans have long favored that step, but professional politicians have stood in the way.) The latter works even if only a few states chose to allocate electors to the national winner. The way to avoid diluting any group’s votes – not just African-Americans, but any group’s votes – is for some states to allocate some electors to the national winner. There probably is a Voting Rights lawsuit to bring on this topic.
The View from Utah
This piece in the Salt Lake Tribune explains how the Electoral College, as it currently operates, harms Utah voters:
Any power smaller states gained under the original system has been lost to unpredictable battleground states, of any size. In 2016, why did Iowa (after primary season), with 3 million people, a strong rural component and six electoral votes (all like Utah), get 21 campaign events and Utah only one? Because Iowa’s a battleground state.
In Utah, we had 10 presidential contenders. The Republican won the statewide popular vote with only 46 percent of the total. The other nine candidates combined won 54 percent. The result? The six electors chosen by winner-take-all to ride our Electoral Bus to its destination represented fewer than half of our voters. That’s how Utah contributed to the infamous popular vote/electoral vote split, and with margins in presidential contests growing tighter every cycle, keeping these state winner-take-all laws makes the possibility of more splits loom over every future election.
However, if the winner of the national popular vote became the president:
[B]ig states, small states, big cities, small cities, rural communities nationwide — where you vote won’t matter, that you vote will. Every vote in states like Utah will be as powerful as every vote in states like Florida, and candidates must go everywhere to get them. On that election night, for the first time in American history, finally, electors representing the nation’s entire vote will ride Electoral Buses to their destination: the selection of the president.
Competing Draws a Crowd
Elaine Kamarck notes that the Bush vs McCain campaign in 2000 attracted “enormous amounts of attention and new voters.” Page 77.
They competed in many states. The media followed them. In state after state they battled, paying attention to local issues, building Republican party registration numbers. Exactly what would happen in the general election from June to November if the parties’ candidates had to win the national vote in order to get the electors necessary to become president.
The Republicans who want to ground their party on the center-right, where the majority of Americans are found, should vigorously fight for a national popular vote as the way to choose the president. They would be basing the Republican “base” on a true majority of voters.
New Mexico Considers National Popular Vote
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact has passed in the New Mexico House and will soon be taken up by the state’s Senate. In an article in the Public News Service, Barry Fadem of National Popular Vote explains:
“Under the current system, New Mexico has no influence, does not play any role in the presidential election and is totally ignored. … Under National Popular Vote, we believe it will be a 50 state campaign, and every vote in every state will count.”
The article goes on to discuss additional benefits of adopting the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. University of Colorado Political Science Professor Ken Bickers explains a sometimes overlooked upside of a nationwide election: higher voter turnout. A system in which the winner of the national popular vote would become the president “would probably lead to greater voter turnout in states that are currently ignored, because there would be an effort by both parties to get people out to vote, because it would no longer be 51 contests.”
Electoral college determines foreign policy
The United States foreign policy with respect to South America and Central America is inconsistent, inadequate, and frequently anti-democratic. When it comes to Venezuela now, one can make a strong argument for the promotion of a fair popular vote in that country as a way to elect the leader.
How did this happen? Do we certainly have an outbreak of common sense in our foreign policy? Skeptics might note that nothing about American policy as to Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador seems focused on the well-being of the people in those countries.
Immigrants from those countries have little or no impact on the results in any swing state in the election coming up in 2020.
But Venezuelan immigrants who may vote in swing state Florida conceivably could determine the allocation of its electoral votes. So Venezuela now gets attention while the other countries are ignored. Once again the pernicious Electoral College is at work, undermining America’s dream for most people in the country and most people in the world.
The Electoral College Makes Presidents Unaccountable
Declaring a national emergency to build a wall on the southern border is wildly unpopular. Polls have consistently shown that about 66% of Americans think that Trump should not declare a national emergency to build the wall, and only 31% think that he should.
So why would a president up for reelection double down on such an unpopular policy?
The answer is the Electoral College. The president does not need a majority of Americans to like what he is doing. All he needs to do is to turn out his base and win by a slim plurality in the few swing states that will decide the election.
If, on the other hand, the president needed to win the most votes from across the whole country, it would be unthinkable for Trump or any other president to chart a course that two-thirds of the nation opposed.
Florida Newspaper Endorses National Popular Vote
In an editorial urging Florida to commit its electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, the South Florida Sun Sentinel explains that choosing the president by the popular vote could benefit either party and would force candidates to look for votes everywhere across the country instead of just in a few swing states:
It may be a challenge to persuade Republican politicians to endorse reform. They have won every electoral dysfunction since the birth of their party. But that isn’t guaranteed. A shift of just 60,000 votes in Ohio would have elected John Kerry in 2004 despite President George W. Bush having more votes nationwide.
It isn’t difficult to imagine a future election, if not next year, in which a moderate Republican almost wins California and New York and has a popular majority but loses the electoral vote.
. . .
[T]he issue should not depend on which side won by dysfunction or thinks it will again. America can’t afford more outcomes that sap the public’s respect for the process and undermine the authenticity of the presidency.
Another major liability is that the present system treats most voters — those living everywhere but in 10 or so “battleground” states — as unworthy of attention. There is no incentive for a Republican to troll for votes in California or New York, or for a Democrat to appeal to Texas. In 2016, thirty-eight states saw practically no campaign activity. It took place almost entirely in the 12 “battleground” states. Fewer voters went to the polls where their votes were taken for granted
Giving Female Candidates a Fair Chance
If Senator Gillibrand is running a feminist campaign, then she might want to make this useful point: in the last presidential campaign almost ten million more women voted than did men. By a huge majority the female voters preferred Clinton. The majority of women for Clinton was bigger than the majority of men for Trump.
So what happened? How could the more numerous group of voters, with the stronger preference, not have elected their choice as president?
The only reason that the majority of women did not see their preferred candidate sworn in as president in January 2017 was the Electoral College system.
In a tiny few swing states, the female preference was a little below the national average.
If every vote counted equally and all were counted in a nationwide tally that chose the president, then women (and men) already would have had a fair chance to elect a female president.
And if Senator Gillibrand, or anyone else, wants a fair chance to be a feminist candidate, then the most important reform would be the appointment of electors to the national vote winner instead of only to the winner of statewide pluralities.
Colorado National Popular Vote Bill One Step Closer to Passing
A Colorado state House committee has voted to advance the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact to a full House vote. The bill has already been approved by the Colorado Senate. The bill will now go to a full vote in the House, and if approved, to Colorado’s governor, Jared Polis (D), who supports the measure.
If Colorado adopts the Compact, Colorado’s 9 electoral votes will be added to the 172 electors that will be pledged to the winner of the national popular vote if states with a total of 270 electoral votes join the Compact.