Ugh…
BISMARCK, N.D. - A movement to essentially junk the Electoral College and award the presidency to the winner of the nationwide popular vote is making some headway in states large and small — including, somewhat improbably, North Dakota.
The National Popular Vote movement is aimed at preventing a repeat of 2000, when Democrat Al Gore lost despite getting more votes than George W. Bush.
Backers are asking states to change their laws to award their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote nationally.
A bill to do that was introduced last week in the North Dakota Legislature, even though it could reduce the political influence of small states like North Dakota.
The bill is being sponsored, in part, by Duane DeKrey (who ran for the NDGOP’s nomination for North Dakota’s House seat, losing out to Matt Mechtel):
“Its strength is, it is what the people want,” said one of the sponsors, Rep. Duane DeKrey, Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. “It kind of takes out that system where the person who gets the most votes doesn’t necessarily win.”
Do people really want to do away with the Electoral College? Because among the voters I know it’s not exactly a high priority.
Nor should it be for the citizens of a small-population state like North Dakota. I’m surprised DeKrey is even proposing it here.
The problem I see with this legislation is that it doesn’t really fix the problems it sets out to fix. By assigning a state’s electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote there is a chance that those electoral votes could go to someone who the majority of citizens in that state voted against.
Take California, for instance. In the 2004 election John Kerry got 54% of California’s popular vote while President Bush got 44%. Nationally, though, President Bush got 51% of the popular votes while John Kerry got just 48%. Would it really have been fair to Californians to send all 54 of their electoral votes to President Bush despite the fact that the heavy majority of them had voted for Kerry?
I don’t think so. Nor would it have been fair in 2000 to send all three of North Dakota’s electoral votes to Al Gore when 63% of the state’s voters cast their ballots for President Bush.
Our founding fathers didn’t establish the Electoral College because they thought it’d be fun to have it. They established a) because they feared that a tyrant may be able to push his way into power by manipulating the opinions of the population at large (a defense against populism, in essence) and b) because the smaller states demanded it at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia at the time of this nation’s birth in order to keep the voices of their citizens from being drowned out by the voices of citizens in larger states.
By allotting smaller states the same number of electoral votes as they have representatives in Congress the Electoral College ensures that each state has no fewer than three electoral votes. North Dakota has 642,000 people meaning that each of the three electoral votes in this state represents 214,000 people. California has 33,871,000 people, meaning that each of that state’s 54 electoral votes represents approximately 627,000 people. So North Dakota’s citizens have more pull in the electoral system than California’s millions. Which is as it should be given that the smaller states are otherwise overwhelmed in Congress by the larger states.
It’s a balance of power among the various states, in essence, though the proponents of this electoral votes agreement would undermine that balance of power. Which is why I can’t figure out how a legislator in a small-population state could come to support something like this. If anything, a better way to make the Electoral College more responsive to the desires of the people while maintaining the balance of power between big states and little states would be to end the practice of giving all of a state’s electoral votes to the winner of that state’s popular vote. A better way would be for the state legislatures to apportion each state’s electoral votes according to the number of popular votes each candidate got.
States with just three electoral votes could give two votes to the candidate who won the popular vote with one electoral vote going to whoever came in second. Larger states with more electoral votes could probably do something a little different maybe involving the percentage of the popular vote each candidate got, but regardless this would be much preferable to forcing a state to hand over it’s electoral votes to a candidate the majority of it’s citizens didn’t vote for.