The indefensible reality is that more than 99% of campaign attention was showered on voters in just ten states in 2012- and that in today’s political climate, the swing states have become increasingly fewer and fixed.
Where you live should not determine how much, if at all, your vote matters.
The current state-by-state winner-take-all method of awarding electoral votes (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but later enacted by 48 states), ensures that the candidates, after the conventions, will not reach out to about 80% 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.
Presidential candidates concentrate their attention on only a handful of closely divided “battleground” states and their voters. There is no incentive for them to bother to care about the majority of states where they are hopelessly behind or safely ahead to win.
10 of the original 13 states are ignored now.
Four out of five Americans were ignored in the 2012 presidential election. After being nominated, Obama visited just eight closely divided battleground states, and Romney visited only 10. These 10 states accounted for 98% of the $940 million spent on campaign advertising. They decided the election.
Two-thirds of the general-election campaign events (176 of 253) were in just 4 states (Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and Iowa).
None of the 10 most rural states mattered, as usual.
About 80% of the country was ignored —including 24 of the 27 lowest population and medium-small states, and 13 medium and big states like CA, GA, NY, and TX.
National Popular Vote would give a voice to the minority party voters in each state. Now their votes are counted only for the candidate they did not vote for. Now they don’t matter to their candidate. In 2012, 56,256,178 (44%) of the 128,954,498 voters had their vote diverted by the winner-take-all rule to a candidate they opposed (namely, their state’s first-place candidate).
And now votes, beyond the one needed to get the most votes in the state, for winning in a state are wasted and don’t matter to candidates. Utah (5 electoral votes) alone generated a margin of 385,000 “wasted” votes for Bush in 2004. 8 small western states, with less than a third of California’s population, provided Bush with a bigger margin (1,283,076) than California provided Kerry (1,235,659).
With National Popular Vote, every popular vote, everywhere would be counted equally for, and directly assist, the candidate for whom it was cast.
Candidates would need to care about voters across the nation, not just undecided voters in a handful of swing states. The political reality would be that when every voter is equal, the campaign must be run in every part of the country.
When and where voters matter, then so do the issues they care about most.
National Popular Vote ensures that every voter is equal, every voter will matter, in every state, in every presidential election, and the candidate with the most votes wins, as in virtually every other election in the country.
Under National Popular Vote, every voter, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in every presidential election. Every vote would be included in the state counts and national count.
100% of the ballots in every state are counted in order to determine the outcome of the presidential election and the numerous other offices and propositions on the ballots. Representatives of the candidates, political parties, proponents and opponents of ballot measures, civic groups, and the media have the ability to obtain the vote count for every precinct.
With both the current system and the National Popular Vote approach, all counting, recounting, and judicial proceedings must be conducted so as to reach a “final determination” prior to the common nationwide date for the meeting of the Electoral College. 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. 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.
The provisions in the U.S. Constitution under which the president is elected through a special vote of the House of Representatives weren't intended specifically for cases of "tie votes" in the Electoral College. The more likely scenario was that a presidential election involved more than two candidates, and none of the candidates won enough electoral votes to get a majority of votes in the Electoral College.
That may sound like an unlikely scenario, but that's exactly what happened in 1824. By all accounts, Andrew Jackson should have "won" that election. He had more electoral votes than John Quincy Adams (99-84), more popular votes by a wide margin (41% to 31%), and won more states (12 to 7).
And yet the election was decided in the House of Representatives because Jackson didn't win a majority of the electoral votes (he needed 131). William Crawford (41 electoral votes) and Henry Clay (37 electoral votes) won enough states to keep Jackson from winning a majority in the Electoral College. So Adams was elected president, Jackson went home the loser, and the nation survived.
And I have news for you: Even in a "national popular vote" scenario you're still going to end up with small numbers of states getting most of the attention. I don't see how a presidential election that is decided only by voters living within 500 miles of Columbus, Ohio is any improvement over the system that's been in place for more than two centuries. What happens if 25 different candidates get on the presidential ballot? If one candidate gets 8% of the vote nationwide and that's more than anyone else, does he/she win the election? How's that supposed to work?
There's a good reason why popular vote totals never mattered in the U.S. Constitution: When the Constitution was written, many states chose their electors through the state legislatures rather than a popular vote. Is there anything wrong with that?
One thing I do know for sure is that a national popular vote for a country full of idiots. As Barack Obama has demonstrated so clearly, the last thing this country needs is a president whose record of accomplishment looks like something I'd find in an 8th-grade class president.