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A major attack has been launched against our Constitution by those who want to fundamentally transform the United States by getting rid of the Electoral College. They want to change our constitutional form of government without amending the Constitution in the proper way. Over the years, several amendments have been proposed to abolish or change the Electoral College, but they have gone nowhere. So now some politicians are trying to do this in a devious way without complying with the constitutional amendment process. This plan involves stealing votes on a massive scale. This plot is called the Campaign for the National Popular Vote (NPV). It was started by three losers defeated in the 1980 Reagan landslide: Rep. John Anderson, Sen. Birch Bayh, and Rep. John Buchanan. Now it has a lot of money behind it and has hired highly-paid lobbyists who go around asking state legislators to enact identical bills requiring their own presidential electors to ignore the winner of their own state's presidential election and cast all their state's votes for the presidential candidate they think received the most popular votes nationwide. The elimination of the Electoral College system 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 who carry California or New York would enjoy a built-in advantage. The Electoral College is one of the legacies of the inspired genius of our Founding Fathers. It is the mirror image of the Great Compromise that gave us Congress: the Senate based on a union of sovereign states, and the House based on "we, the people." People who pretend that Electoral College system is undemocratic are not only ignorant of the history and purposes of the U.S. Constitution, but they probably don't even understand baseball, the Great American Game. Basing the election on a plurality of the popular vote while ignoring the states would be like the New York Yankees claiming they won the 1960 World Series because they outscored the Pirates in runs 55-27 and in hits 91-60. Yet, the Pirates won that World Series fair and square, 4 games to 3, and no one challenges their victory. If we had had NPV in 2000, NPV would have elected Al Gore as President and Joe Lieberman as Vice President because they received a half million more popular votes than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. It's time for all Americans to rise up and say No to the "Al Gore Republicans" who are promoting NPV. |
