Posted on 06/23/2010 9:12:23 PM PDT by OldDeckHand
You won’t hear about it in the mainstream media, but the Electoral College is on the verge of being eliminated. One important legislative vote could occur Thursday. Two others could occur in the upcoming days and weeks.
A California-based group, National Popular Vote, is lobbying hard for a dangerous piece of anti-Electoral College legislation. My NRO article on the mechanics of the legislation is here. Five states have already approved NPV, but now three additional states are dangerously close to joining them: Delaware, Massachusetts, and New York. Another trio of state legislatures approved the scheme, but their governors vetoed the plan. These latter states remain important; a reasonable argument can be made that the gubernatorial vetoes are irrelevant.
If each of these states is counted, NPV could have as many as 169 electoral votes in favor of its plan. It needs 270. NPV has come startlingly close to success even as most Americans remain completely unaware that the presidential-election process is so close to being turned on its head.
The American presidential-election system is a unique blend of federalism and democracy, combining purely democratic state-level elections with a national election among the states. The practical effect of this system is that a candidate can’t win unless he appeals to a wide variety of voters around the nation. NPV’s plan tries to keep the democratic portions of the election, even as it strips the system of its federalist aspects. It fails, instead managing to lose both.
(Excerpt) Read more at corner.nationalreview.com ...
This increases the political power of the states voting for the compact relative to the power of the states either voting against it, or not taking it up at all. You could see a kind of equal protection argument from the states that didn't adopt this nonsense, asserting that their Constitutional rights were abridged absent the due process guaranteed in the Constitution vis-a-vis the ratification process.
On what side of the argument do you believe the constitutional originalists are going to fall - Scalia, Thomas, Robert & Alito? Not your side, that is a certainty.
Incidentally, I'm not going to argue with a cut-and-paste machine. If you don't have any original to add to the discussion, then don't add anything at all. Wrote recitation of a liberal political organizations talking points usually doesn't cut it around here.
Some states already split their EC votes. Nebraska did a 4:1 McCain:Obama split in the 2008 election.
A lot of discussion has taken place since that post. But this 'change' is nothing but a scheme to get around the founders intent that part of the representation in Congress and the Electoral College be based on population, and that part be based upon the individual states.
This scheme tries to eliminate the portion based upon the individual states, or the two senator per state representation in Congress, which is also incorporated into the number of electors to the EC each state receives.
This scheme would also, at times, have the effect of giving a state's electoral votes to a candidate that did not win the state's voters, and possibly to candidates who lost by significant margins. A nonsensical, and unconstitutional scheme.
But like many other questions, this will depend upon political hacks in black robes.
Al Gore? Is that you? :/
That entire argument about small states and battleground states is nonsense because the prevailing political philosophies, or party loyalties, in various states change. We have many examples since WWII, the changes in the South and California, and several formerly Republican areas in the North, and changes other areas around the nation.
This is a scheme to skirt the will of the founders that has been followed for about 220 years. The states might choose between winner-take-all and an allocated approach, but there is no precedent for assigning all a states electors to a losing candidate who might have won a national popular vote. And that would happen, and probably often if very many states used this scheme.
Talk about disenfranchising the voters, a subject we hear about often, but this would real disenfranchisement of a sort never before seen.
Lol, lol, this is the Algore scheme to guarantee that 2000 does not repeat itself in the future. The Libs just can't get over 2000, and that is exactly why this scheme has been concocted.
And you think Algore would be posting on here in opposition? LOl.
They won handedly last election....in fact, quite embarassingly so. I don’t understand why they want to do this. Yes Al Gore would have been President, but Bill Clinton would not have been. It is strange that they would even visit this.
I should have been saying: sneaky scheme.
My comment was focused on your overuse ot the word "scheme".
I know exactly what it was focused on, but it is quite ironic that the sneaky scheme being discussed here should bring to mind the guy who used the term risky scheme and whose fate in 2000 is the driving force for this sneaky scheme.
It's a sneaky scheme to skirt the constitution, all wrapped up in flowery, self-serving platitudes. No doubt about it. The Libs have been stewing over this since 2000.
Great Constitutional issue for SCOTUS ...
I was just pointing out what MD has on the books by way of the law ...
If California wants to divvy up their electoral votes, it is their call (and an easy pick up of at least SOME electoral votes for our R nominee, at the expense of the D nominee who is almost assured to otherwise get them all).
It’s much more easy to corrupt the popular vote as a group of carefully subverted districts can easily outnumber vast regions of the country.
Well in most Democrat-run cities it is very easy to simply print the number of ballots needed to give whatever Democrat that is running on a national ticket the number of votes needed to win. Election fraud in Philadelphia, Detroit, Newark, etc. will always carry a Democrat over the top in any national race.
Looks like the states that are going for this constitutional end run are ''blue'' so they'd probably opt out of the system for that election. The sad thing is that the only reason Bush lost some of close states in 2000 was rampant vote fraud by the rat party. They just weren't able to quite steal enough.
The potential for political fraud and mischief is not uniquely associated with either the current system or a national popular vote. In fact, the current system magnifies the incentive for fraud and mischief in closely divided battleground states because all of a state’s electoral votes are awarded to the candidate who receives a bare plurality of the votes in each state.
Under the current system, the national outcome can be affected by mischief in one of the closely divided battleground states. It only took 537 popular votes in Florida to decide the national electoral college winner in 2000.
1. Why is representation in the House of Representatives based on population, and representation in the Senate based upon two senators per state, regardless of population?
2. Why does the constitution specify a number of electors to the Electoral College equal to their total of representatives plus their two senators?
Why does the constitution contain those two provisions. Don't tell us that it does contain them. Tell us why they are there?
I think that's where the answer to the constitutionality of the scheme being discussed here lies. Such closely related parts of the constitution are probably there for the same underlying reason: the founders intended for representation in Congress, and in the Electoral College, to be based partly on population, and partly on the individual states. Schemes that attempt to change that without an amendment are unconstitutional, and awarding EC electors in a state based upon who won a national popular vote definitely changes the weighted population/individual state component of the representation in the EC.
But who knows how a given group of judges might rule.
Bookmarking and BTTT
To turn your example upside down, it is mostly leftist states passing this, so if Maryland votes for the DEM, while the popular vote goes to the GOP, you know the very same leftists in Maryland will throw a hissy fit about having to cast their votes for the GOP candidate.
Yep, this thing would be wild. New York, Massachusetts and California could be casting their electoral votes for a conservative Republican, and Alabama, Mississippi and Wyoming could be forced to cast theirs for a liberal Dim, if all those states were involved in such a scheme.
This entire idea is nonsense, and an attempt to amend the constitution with an end run rather than a constitutional amendment.
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