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A plot is afoot to change our constitutional form of government by ditching the Electoral College. Our Constitution requires that a president be elected by a majority of votes in the Electoral College. But some politicians are scheming to use a compact among as few as eleven of the most populous states in order to change our Constitution without complying with the amendment process. The plan of this Campaign for the National Popular Vote (NPV) is to get states with at least 270 votes in the Electoral College to enact identical bills requiring their own electors to ignore the winner of their state’s election and cast all their state’s ballots for the candidate who the state believes received more popular votes than the other candidates nationwide, even if he fails to win a majority of the popular vote. It’s ridiculous to try to force electors to vote against their constituents. The U.S. Constitution established our method of electing presidents and it has served us well for more than two centuries. It ain’t broke and doesn’t need fixing. The Electoral College represents the inspired genius of our Founding Fathers. It was part of the great compromise that gave us a Congress consisting of the Senate based on equal representation of the states and the House based on population. The Electoral College is the mirror image of this brilliant compromise and allows all states to be players in the process of electing our President. The Electoral College is the successful vehicle by which a presidential candidate achieves a majority in a functioning political process. Because of third parties, we’ve had many elections (including three of the last four) when no presidential candidate received a popular-vote majority. NPV is an outrageous proposal to construct a fake majority by stealing votes away from some candidates and transferring them to another candidate. The fact that most elections are very close makes the Electoral College particularly advantageous. With our loose election procedures (that need to be reformed in several ways), it’s easy to make credible charges of election fraud. An allegation of voter fraud in one state would begin a fatal chain reaction of challenges and recounts as campaign managers try to scrape up additional hundreds of votes in many states at once. The elimination of the Electoral College would overnight make irrelevant the votes of Americans in about 25 states because candidates would zero in on piling up votes in large-population states. Big-city machines would take over, and candidates from California or New York would enjoy a built-in advantage. The NPV slogan “Every Vote Equal” is stunningly dishonest because the NPV proposal is based on legalizing vote-stealing and on changing the rules of presidential elections by a compact of as few as eleven states instead of the 38 states needed to amend the Constitution. NPV should be repudiated. |
