The application of this idea will disenfranchise the voters in the states that adopt this measure, utlimately ignoring and replacing what might have been the choice of the voters of the state with a choice dicated by the law.
Our nation is a federal republic, not a democracy.
The president is not “the president of the people” of the United States. The president is the president of the federal government of “these United States” - the states.
The people in the states choose electors in their states. The states, through their representatives among the electors choose the president.
The only greater element of democracy that might be appropriate might be to hold, under law, the votes of the electors to the choice as expressed by the voters that selected them.
A “national popular vote” is not a well-represented choice of the nation.
“The nation” is not simply a count of the people in it or a count of the people voting in it.
The nation is lived and experienced in its towns, cities, regions and states and the identity of the nation is more bound up in the combination of the identity of all those different communities (of varying sizes and dimensions) than it is some number of persons added up from all of them.
I analyzed the last eight presidential elections. In each of them the winning candidate, in electoral votes, was the candidate chosen by a majority in a majority of counties all across the nation. The loser(s) did not achieve as broad of a national support.
That kind of coverage of “the nation” to collect the electoral votes it represents, is a greater expression of the choice of “the nation” than the mere “most number of people” vote.
The “national popular vote” is another nail in the coffin of this republic that progressives want to pound into the body politic.
The Founding Fathers in the Constitution did not require states to allow their citizens to vote for president, much less award all their electoral votes based upon the vote of their citizens.
The presidential election system we have today is not in the Constitution. State-by-state winner-take-all laws to award Electoral College votes, were eventually enacted by states, using their exclusive power to do so, AFTER the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution. Now our current system can be changed by state laws again.
The Founding Fathers left the choice of method exclusively to the states 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.”
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 Republic is not in any danger from National Popular Vote. It has nothing to do with direct democracy.
With National Popular Vote, citizens would not rule directly but, instead, continue to elect the President by a majority of Electoral College votes, to represent us and conduct the business of government in the periods between elections.
Under National Popular Vote, every vote, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in every presidential election. Every vote would be included in the state counts and national count. The candidate with the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC would get the 270+ electoral votes from the enacting states. That majority of electoral votes guarantees the candidate with the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC wins the presidency.
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.
With National Popular Vote, every 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 the current handful of swing states. The political reality would be that when every vote is equal, the campaign must be run in every part of the country.