What’s
Wrong Today:
One outcome
of the political struggle between Democrats and Republicans is the parties’
continuing efforts to game our voting rules. Nothing makes voters more cynical
than seeing political leaders seemingly supporting or opposing election laws
based solely on their partisan impact — from redistricting reform
to fights over whether to allow early voting.
New York
this week became the 10th state (plus DC) to join the National Popular
Vote Interstate Compact, (NPV). The compact is a clever workaround to the
Electoral College. The Compact seeks to guarantee election of the presidential
candidate who wins the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of
Columbia. The states that have approved NPV so far come in all sizes. Four are
small (Rhode Island, Vermont, and Hawaii, plus the District of Columbia), three
are medium-sized (Maryland, Washington, and Massachusetts), and four are large
(New Jersey, Illinois, California, and now New York).
By signing
on to the Compact, states agree they will award their electoral votes to the
winner of the national popular vote. However, the measure will only be
triggered once states accounting for a majority of electoral votes have joined.
Right now, the states that support
the Compact total 165 of the 270 electoral votes necessary to activate the
national popular vote. There are 538 electoral votes, so a majority is 270.
If states
with an additional 105 electoral votes pass it, the US will hold a presidential
election in which, for the first time in US history, every vote in every state would count equally. The candidate who
receives the most votes will win.
We don’t
need a constitutional amendment to achieve this goal. The Constitution gives
each state power over how to allocate its electoral votes and the ability to
enter into binding interstate compacts. As
Hendrick Hertzberg said in the New
Yorker:
that we elect our Presidents the same way we elect our governors, our mayors,
our senators and representatives, our state legislators, and everybody else: by
adding up all the votes, and then awarding the job to whichever candidate gets
the largest number
And it
does this without changing a word of the Constitution. Can it happen? As Nate
Silver’s
chart below indicates, the relationship between whether a state has joined the
Compact and how it voted in the 2012 presidential election is nearly a 1-to-1
relationship:
The 7 states where
President Obama won by the widest margins, along with DC, have joined. So have
three others — New Jersey, Illinois and Washington — where Obama won by at
least 15 percentage points. But none below that threshold have done so.
The Compact may be able to add Delaware, Connecticut
and Maine, where Obama also won by 15 percentage points or more. But they
account for only 14 total electoral votes (and Maine already has a unique way of apportioning electoral votes).
Oregon and
New Mexico also re-elected Obama by double-digit margins — and those two states
have become increasingly off-limits to Republican presidential candidates — but
have just 12 electoral votes between them.
After
that, you get to states like Michigan and Minnesota, which are blue-leaning but
that are competitive for both parties.
Their
votes might not be quite as influential in the Electoral College as the campaigns
presume — a Democrat who lost Minnesota would probably be in too much trouble
elsewhere to cobble together a 270-vote majority. And what about the swing
states, such as Ohio, New Hampshire and Colorado? Those states, along with
Florida, Virginia, Nevada, Iowa, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, collectively had a
98.6% chance of determining the Electoral College winner in 2012, according to Silver’s
538 blog. In other words, these nine states are 70 times
more powerful than the other 41 (which collectively had a 1.4% chance of
determining the winner) combined.
That’s part
of the reason that many Americans object to the Electoral College. But states whose voters
have a disproportionate amount of influence may be in no mood to give it up. In
theory, recent history shows that states that want a Republican in the White
House might have an incentive to join the Compact. That’s because in the 2008
and 2012 elections, the Electoral College helped Democrats.
That means
that even if Mr. Obama had lost the national popular vote, he could have still
won in the Electoral College. The Electoral College has the potential to elect
a non-winner in the popular vote, something that is contrary to basic
democratic principles. It can render a major state like New York, California or
Texas irrelevant to presidential decision — without adding a corresponding
benefit.
As
Hertzberg says, it’s instructive that all 50 states have an independent
executive and 49 states have also chosen to copy the bicameralism of Congress, but
none has copied the electoral college. And no other liberal democracy uses it
either.
Under
the National Popular Vote, every voter would be politically relevant and equal
in every presidential election. Every vote would be included in the state
counts and national count.
Today,
there is no meaningful competition
in more than two-thirds of states and in even more congressional districts. As
soon as a state has an underlying preference of more than eight or nine
percentage points for one party — no amount of money or voter mobilization can
influence that state’s presidential outcome in a nationally competitive year.
For the
last few presidential cycles, more
than 98% of general election campaign spending and campaign events took
place in only 12 states. Meanwhile, at least
35 states — small and large, Eastern and Western, Democratic and Republican
— received less than one-hundredth of a percent of the attention they would
likely receive under a national popular vote for president.
This makes
a mockery of the idea that in presidential elections all states and all voters
matter. Our all-consuming focus on swing states makes their voters’ concerns
infinitely more important to presidential campaigns than the concerns of the
other two-thirds of Americans.
