Popular Vote, Yeah
Newsflash: The Electoral College is outdated.
People have stopped wearing silly white wigs.
There is a brilliant and practical plan to override The Electoral College with a national popular vote. Hendrik Hertzberg outlined this plan several weeks ago in The New Yorker. Did you miss it? Then The New York Times wrote an editorial last week.
Based on the ingenius suggestion of Stanford Professor John Koza, The Campaign for the National Popular Vote proposes that state legislatures, which have complete control over how their electoral votes are distributed, sign a pact to give all their votes to the candidate who receives the most votes nationally. This pact would take effect only when enough states sign the pact to declare a winner (i.e. 270+ electoral votes, or as few as eleven states). The bill, kicking around the Illinois State House, has been endorsed by the 100 Sun-Times newspapers in the Chicago area. If passed, this will introduce a radical concept into our presidential elections: The person with the most votes wins. Hot dog! Blue state voters and red state voters will matter again. Politicians will have to visit every state, not just the swing states. California babies will be kissed.
This sounds to us like a great idea, an idea that needs energy, widespread awareness and support. Now we have a plan to make this happen. Once this gets passed, we will turn our attention to taking the ludicrous sums of $ out of politics. First things first: Let’s win the campaign for a popular vote.
DISCUSSION: 2 Comments
Well, this would certainly save money, since politicians would only be required to campaign in a dozen or so areas (read “the big cities”), and add as added bonus, would only need to steal votes in those areas as well. It is well established and accepted that many big cities have voter corruption, but that the voter corruption in one area is offset by the corruption elsewhere. Having popular votes would skew that. Right now, politicians go after the little guy, and the independent guy. Little guy doesn’t live in the big city, so he would cease to matter. I think a better thing to do would be to further enact the electoral college thusly: as an example, in Illinois, if you live in the greater Chicago area, your votes go toward 7 electoral votes, and the rest of the state votes go toward the other 14. Votes could potentially be split or all go to the same candidate, but at least the morons in Chicago wouldn’t bring the rest of the state down with them
Shifting to the popular vote has one big advantage from my perspective: rendering the votes of people in the “safe” states relevant. There’s lots of understandable apathy when it comes to voting in the general election in a state like California because everyone knows it’ll go blue. Counting the popular vote would change that.
It also has one smaller advantage: sometimes the electoral college and the popular vote are at odds (as in 2000) and it’s arguably “fairer” to go with the popular vote in such cases.
But the aforementioned are minor problems from my perspective when compared to campaign finance and an effectively closed two-party duopoly.
To fix those deeper issues we’d need reforms like moving to instant runoff voting or some version of proportional representation.