Free Republic

Earlier this week, Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) decided not to veto an obscure law called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPV), which calls for the state's 4 Electoral College votes to be awarded to the presidential candidate who gets the most votes nationally regardless of the outcome in the state. The law doesn't go into effect, however, until states totaling 270 electoral votes join the compact. That's the number of Electoral College votes required to win the presidency. Once dismissed as an unworkable, almost farcical fantasy, the NPV just tallied its 209th electoral vote with Maine, and now...

The top four vote-getters regardless of party will advance to the general election, where voters will be able to rank their choices using instant-runoff voting. The law will also institute ranked-choice voting in presidential elections, though traditional party primaries will remain in effect for those races. The law further sets up new financial disclosure requirements for state-level candidates. The implementation of the new top-four ranked-choice voting system may play a key role in next year’s Senate election, where Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski is facing a tough challenge from the right by former state cabinet official Kelly Tshibaka after she voted...

The United Kingdom is obstructing attempts by European Union institutions to accede to the European Convention of Human Rights, British center-left MEP Richard Howitt has said. "The United Kingdom in a working group in the council for the past year has at every stage dragged out and tried to delay recommendations on the accession," Howitt, the assembly's rapporteur on human rights, told EUobserver over the phone on Thursday (19 April). "At first it was France and the United Kingdom; now it's just the United Kingdom. It's shameful," he added. EU institutions obliged themselves to accede to the convention, a 60-year...

Arguably, the greatest Liberal power-grab in 20th century America was the passage of the 17th Amendment to the US Constitution. Until its ratification in 1913, US Senators were elected by state electors, usually persons serving in that state’s legislature. The rationale for the elector system originated at the time the Constitution was created in the 1780s and was the same as for a College of Electors for President and Vice-president: to protect the smaller political entities (for President, the individual states, and for Senators, a state’s disparate counties) from being steam-rolled by one geographically small area with a large voter...