You'll have to forgive me for opening with a joke, but there's been a "song" running through my mind all week. It's from an old comedy routine I heard decades ago, so I have no idea which comedian to credit. The comedian was suggesting new lyrics for our national anthem, with a practical interpretation based on when we usually actually sing it. So, everyone sing along with me, in your collective heads:
"As we stand here waiting / For the ball game to start..."
Don't know why that's been running through my head... heh. Actually, that's a lie. I'm just as interested as the next pundit in what the Supremes are going to say tomorrow about Obamacare, but I just don't think it's worth talking about here until it happens, that's all. Instead, I'd like to take a summertime flight of electoral fancy.
Once or twice per presidential election, I like to engage in the sheerest of blue-sky speculation about possible interesting outcomes that could happen. Four years ago, I engaged in idle speculation about a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College. This time around, the scenario I've been hearing bandied about is that Barack Obama wins the Electoral College vote, but Mitt Romney wins the popular vote. Barring Supreme Court cases, this would mean a second term for Barack Obama, of course.
In recent history, we've already had one such election, as Al Gore got hundreds of thousands more votes than George W. Bush did. This would merely turn the tables on the 2000 outcome, to put it one way.
The Republicans would certainly howl about such an outcome. It is debatable which side of the political aisle is more effective at such howling (and which side does a better job of such yowling and outrage), but it's fairly certain that we would look back at all the birther nonsense as being a walk in the park compared to what conservatives would be saying about Obama, should this scenario actually play out.
Howling and yowling aside, though, there would likely also be an interesting (and more concrete) effect should Obama win his second term in this fashion -- Republicans would suddenly discover an effort which has been quietly building steam ever since the 2000 election. I speak of the "National Popular Vote" effort.
This organized effort is, at its heart, an end-run around trying to get a constitutional amendment. According to the National Popular Vote organization, this does not mean it is an unconstitutional effort, though (a major distinction worth making).
The idea is simple, at its heart. The Constitution says that each state may allocate its electoral vote as it sees fit. The "NPV" effort aims to convince enough states to change their electoral laws so that whichever candidate wins the national popular vote will be guaranteed the White House.
Nine states, to date, have approved this NPV scheme by passing identical laws. These laws state that the entire delegation of state electors will vote for the nationwide winner of the presidential vote no matter what the actual vote result is in each state. Say you lived in California, for instance. The state votes overwhelmingly for Obama, but when it comes time for the Electoral College to vote, all 55 votes are cast for Mitt Romney (to use the Obama/Romney election as an example).
Be advised, however, that there's a "trigger" built in to this law -- it will not go into effect in any state until enough states have passed the same NPV law so that their electoral votes add up to the 270 Electoral College votes necessary to win the election. So the whole scheme wouldn't come into play until it was actually meaningful (and fair) to the ultimate result.
As you can see, this sort of thing would be much better handled by an actual constitutional amendment that abolished the Electoral College and simply decreed that the national vote was the ultimate arbiter. But since constitutional amendments are almost impossible to get passed, the National Public Vote folks are trying to incrementally build support for the national vote being final.
The problem with this effort -- up until now -- is the unbalanced nature of the states that have passed such laws. The nine states where this is now election law are: California, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Vermont, Washington, and Washington, D.C. You'll immediately note that these states are mighty blue indeed -- nary a red state among them. Chalk this up to the aftermath of the 2000 election. But also please note that this means that a total of 132 state electoral votes have now signed up for the scheme -- which is roughly half of the 270 needed.
Fast-forward to 2013, when President Obama is sworn in with less than a majority of the popular vote. Among the howling from conservatives, there will likely be an effort to do something about the problem. I can easily see quite a few red Republican states suddenly discovering the NPV effort, and moving legislation in their respective statehouses. If Texas led the way and passed NPV first, then only 100 more electoral votes would be needed to make the plan a reality, to put the situation in perspective.
Move even further forward in time, to the next election where the Electoral College vote didn't match the national popular vote, and we'd be in for one whale of a court fight (which would make Bush v. Gore look tame, indeed).
The interesting thing, however, is if the Obama scenario plays out, and if the National Popular Vote folks get their wish with the addition of a pile of red states (two mighty big "ifs," to be sure) -- the result would be an almost evenly-divided bipartisan effort between blue states and red. This would tend to give it more legitimacy with the public, one assumes. If only blue (or near-blue) states totaling 270 electoral votes passed the NPV law, and then a subsequent election were determined by the scheme, it would look a lot different than if the states were evenly mixed between blue and red.
The truth of the matter is that if we ever did get to the point of having an electoral majority of states pass such a law, then likely the public would be a lot more open to an actual constitutional amendment which solved the problem more simply, by just abolishing the Electoral College once and for all.
But that doesn't stop me from my idle summertime speculation, as we stand here waiting for nine players to take the field (so to speak), and the Obamacare ball game to start.
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Chris Weigant: 2012 Electoral Math
Matthew Dowd: How Obama Could Lose the Popular Vote and Win the Election
 |
 |
|
| Obama | Romney | |
|---|---|---|
| Electoral Votes (270 to win) |
332 | 206 |
| Obama | Romney | |
|---|---|---|
| Total | 65,899,660 | 60,932,152 |
| Percent | 51.1% | 47.2% |
| Democrats* | Republicans | |
|---|---|---|
| Current Senate | 53 | 47 |
| Seats gained or lost | +2 | -2 |
| New Total | 55 | 45 |
| Democrats | Republicans | |
|---|---|---|
| Seats won | 201 | 234 |
At least take away two votes from every state to make the electoral votes better approximate the state populations.
[I am hijacking your comment to make a completely irrelevant point, just to warn you up front.]
499 fans. Woo hoo!
Who will be the magic 500? C'mon people, I just need ONE more fan to hit a new high point...
:-)
-CW
The 2000 presidential election was an artificial crisis created because of Bush's lead of 537 popular votes in Florida. Gore's nationwide lead was 537,179 popular votes (1,000 times larger). Given the miniscule number of votes that are changed by a typical statewide recount (averaging only 274 votes); no one would have requested a recount or disputed the results in 2000 if the national popular vote had controlled the outcome. Indeed, no one (except perhaps almanac writers and trivia buffs) would have cared that one of the candidates happened to have a 537-vote margin in Florida.
Recounts are far more likely in the current system of state-by-state winner-take-all methods.
The possibility of recounts should not even be a consideration in debating the merits of a national popular vote. No one has ever suggested that the possibility of a recount constitutes a valid reason why state governors or U.S. Senators, for example, should not be elected by a popular vote.
The question of recounts comes to mind in connection with presidential elections only because the current system so frequently creates artificial crises and unnecessary disputes.
Close enough for a recount, especially with the allegations of fraud in Chicago.
You know what's going to happen. Myself and thousands of other will be in federal court the next day suing on the grounds of violation of the equal protection clause. The reasoning, I voted for Romney. He won the most votes and won Ca., but the state says becasue of something else in other states, he does not win the but loser, in this case Obama, wins. My vote has been disenfrachised because the guy I voted for had the most votes, but the state now says it doesn't matter, he still loses. I have my doubts that the NPV would be constitutional.
There will be no constitutional amendment to remove the Electoral College.
It ensures that every vote 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 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.
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.
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.
No one would be disenfranchised.
The Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment says:
"no state [shall] deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws"
The Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment only restricts a given state in the manner it treats persons "within its jurisdiction."
The National Popular Vote bill does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
Unless a substantial majority of the electoral college signs on, NPV might prove fragile over the long haul, if enough states have second thoughts and opt out. As I read it, that won't cancel the law in other states, but a less-than-270 electoral vote NPV coalition would no longer absolutely guarantee popular vote selects the chief executive.
There ought to be a better way, but there probably isn't.
Six minutes 'till the Court barks, gotta go.
If a Democratic presidential candidate receives the most votes, the state's dedicated Democratic party activists who have been chosen as its slate of electors become the Electoral College voting bloc. If a Republican presidential candidate receives the most votes, the state's dedicated Republican party activists who have been chosen as its slate of electors become the Electoral College voting bloc. The winner of the presidential election is the candidate who collects 270 votes from Electoral College voters from among the winning party's dedicated activists.
Currently, our national elections are decided in states where both parties are competitive, where both parties are represented within the governing apparatus,
But consider those states where the Secretary of State says that he considers a well-run election is one in which his side wins? What of one-party states?
In the current system, there is not much mischief they can do. They can deliver their state's electoral votes, and that is it. There is no difference between a 20% and a 40% margin in those states.
But consider a close national election where such heavily partisan states can add or subtract hundreds of thousands of votes. Partisans may consider it their DUTY to essentially rig the national vote.
In 2008, the Republicans contested the election of Al Franken, Senator from Minnesota, through JULY. Currently, only elections where the margin is close are put under the microscope. There would be no point in checking all the absentee votes in a state where the margins are 20+%, no point in contesting them.
And perhaps there should be more pressure to get every vote properly counted, and treated as if the entire election's legitimacy could turn on how each vote is treated. But currently, in elections where the results are not expected to be close, there is a LOT of sloppiness. Look at all the mishaps in vote counting in the Republican Primaries.
National Popular Vote would limit the benefits to be gained by fraud or voter suppression. One suppressed vote would be one less vote. One fraudulent vote would only win one vote in the return. In the current electoral system, one fraudulent vote could mean 55 electoral votes, or just enough electoral votes to win the presidency without having the most popular votes in the country.
For a national popular vote election to be as easy to switch as 2000, it would have to be two hundred times closer than the 1960 election--and, in popular-vote terms, forty times closer than 2000 itself.
Which system offers voter suppressors or fraudulent voters a better shot at success for a smaller effort?
I would rather have more frequent repeats of Florida in 2000 than something 50 times as big.
The Republicans whine and stamp their feet like the spoiled brats that they are because it works. They get what they want and give nothing in return. You can bet that once they see how to manipulate this NPV to their advantage (nothing has been done to prevent Diebolding the vote counts, after all), it will be the completion of the corporatist takeover of America. No vote ever again will produce the will of the people. It will all be a big game intended to let us pretend that we aren't living in a dictatorship.
No chance Romney will win the popular vote. He won't say what he will do and he is weird.
More than 2,110 state legislators (in 50 states) have sponsored and/or cast recorded votes in favor of the National Popular Vote bill.
It has passed 31 state legislative chambers in 21 states, and been enacted by 9 jurisdictions with 132 electoral votes - 49% of the 270 needed.
NationalPopularVote