The National Popular Vote bill preserves the Electoral College and state control of elections. It changes the way electoral votes are awarded in the Electoral College.
The current state-by-state winner-take-all method of awarding electoral votes (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but since enacted by 48 states), under which all of a state’s electoral votes are awarded to the candidate who gets the most votes in each separate state, ensures that the candidates, after the primaries, in 2012 will not reach out to about 76% of the states and their voters. Candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, campaign, or care about the voter concerns in the dozens of states where they are safely ahead or hopelessly behind.
More than 2/3rds of the states and people have been just spectators to the presidential elections. That’s more than 85 million voters.
Policies important to the citizens of ‘flyover’ states are not as highly prioritized as policies important to ‘battleground’ states when it comes to governing.
States have the responsibility and power to make all of their voters relevant in every presidential election and beyond.
Unable to agree on any particular method, the Founding Fathers left the choice of method for selecting presidential electors exclusively to the states by adopting the language contained in section 1 of Article II of the U.S. Constitution— “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors . . .” The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly characterized the authority of the state legislatures over the manner of awarding their electoral votes as “plenary” and “exclusive.”
Federalism concerns the allocation of power between state governments and the national government. The National Popular Vote bill concerns how votes are tallied, not how much power state governments possess relative to the national government. The powers of state governments are neither increased nor decreased based on whether presidential electors are selected along the state boundary lines, or national lines (as with the National Popular Vote).
Personally, I'd rather see a system based on winners in congressional districts with the extra two votes going to the majority winner.
If we have a tie, or a winner with less total votes, so what?. It's happened before and we survived.
Take it to total votes nation-wide, and we become another 3rd world cleptrocracy --- not that we are not close now.
Every time people try to outwit the Framers, they just screw thing up. Leave it alone. It works.
Federalism concerns the allocation of power between state governments and the national government. The National Popular Vote bill concerns how votes are tallied, not how much power state governments possess relative to the national government. The powers of state governments are neither increased nor decreased based on whether presidential electors are selected along the state boundary lines, or national lines (as with the National Popular Vote).
BS. If states have no say in selecting the Chief Executive of the States, they have no power. That statement itself is contradictory. Take an example. Mining Coal. We get some eco freak running for president who spreads horror stories on coal across the nation and promises to shut them down on day 1. He wins a majority of 50%+1 vote nation wide with his scare tactics.
Even though the States of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Wyoming, and Montana voted against him by 100%, they must give him their electoral votes? Are you kidding? You are asking for nothing but pandering, media driven, demagogues. They will win every time.
That is killing the states, and they will become nothing but provinces answering to Washington on every issue.
What's next? The Senate? Why should little Wyoming have two Senators and great big California only have two. Kill the senate too while you are at it. It's not democratic... right?
Just rip up the rest of the Constitution and throw it away and forget about freedom from the Washington beast.
If Fred Thompson is into this (or a paid spokesmen for it like he is for insurance companies) perhaps the anti-federalists back in 1788 were correct... they were just 200 years off on their time line for when the central government would seize all power and impose their will on all.