The National Popular Vote Is A Fine Way To Ferret Out Progressive Idiots

Posted on | December 9, 2011 | 39 Comments

by Smitty

Senator Mitch McConnell swings by Heritage for a quick interview on current topics.

Screw these National Popular Vote fools. McConnell points out that the Electoral College, while perhaps not perfect, is the Constitutional mechanism in place. It provides a final sanity check. In the Information Age, where there is an increasing gut feeling that the Democrat Party is as capable of participating honestly elections as it is capable of getting a budget passed in the Senate, that Electoral College looks increasingly prescient.

The same people that tell you that establishing the validity of a vote via a photo ID is raaaaacism are trying to argue that a historically working system, the Electoral College, must be replaced by something with fewer checks for fraud. And the ‘arguably’ best example they’ve got of why this recreational change should be rammed through, Saint Albert of Gore in 2000, is a bloated pile of Nobel/Academy/Scientific fraud.

And the means employed to enact the NPV, a state-level end-around of Article V of the Constitution, further underscores the doublethink involved in the discussion. Do this correctly, or do it not at all.

Furthermore, look at who wants it. If the value of an idea isn’t clearly good or bad, then check its supporters. When you look at the States that have bought this NPV line of hooey, you note that they are all Blue. This is just another brick in the wall of the mausoleum of our Republic. The moocher States are setting out to suck more from the producer States.

Rather than pass this, we need to let the SCOTUS know on no uncertain terms that ObamaCare must go, and start rolling back every false, crypto-Marxist, anti-liberty, Progressive piece of poo passed into law in the last century. Anyone in favor of NPV is either on the wrong side or hasn’t thought it through fully. And that’s how I feel about NPV.

I don’t agree entirely that this election is about Barack Obama himself. #OccupyResoluteDesk is the culminating point of the Progressive project. We could maintain this general course toward a bureaucratic state, where liberty is a fond memory, you pick your patron early and find your way to claw out some existence within the body of Leviathan.

Or, as I think is going to occur, we will review history outside of what the Media Overlords want us to hear, realize we’ve been rooked, and painfully set about improving matters. It won’t happen quickly. Progressives have counter-attacked liberty successfully in Ohio, and are trying in Wisconsin. But liberty and God are on the side of Americans, and not these Union thugs.

Update: linked at Legal Insurrection.

Category: Barack Obama, Democrats

Comments

39 Responses to “The National Popular Vote Is A Fine Way To Ferret Out Progressive Idiots”

K-Bob
December 9th, 2011 @ 2:13 pm

Razor, 1 EA.
The Osprey
December 9th, 2011 @ 2:45 pm

NPV sounds like a social disease. And it is!
Finrod Felagund
December 9th, 2011 @ 3:44 pm

If anything you’ve undersold the colossal stupidity and fraud opportunity of NPV, Smitty. Anyone who brings up the 2000 election as a point for NPV needs to be forcefully told “Yeah, and look at how screwed up recounting Florida alone was. Can you even begin to imagine the abject and utter fustercluck it would be if we had to recount the entire country?”
Anonymous
December 9th, 2011 @ 3:45 pm

Unfortunately, Fred Thompson proved he might be getting senile when he endorsed this a few months ago.
» Mock the vote – Open - Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion
December 9th, 2011 @ 4:53 pm

[…] Smitty is having none of that crap National Popular Vote proposal. I posted about this very bad idea back in October. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it; and if it is broke, don’t make it so that Democrats have an easier time stealing an election worse. […]
smitty
December 9th, 2011 @ 5:09 pm

Senile, paid: whatever.
K-Bob
December 9th, 2011 @ 5:36 pm

Say, are you in the market for a reverse mortgage?

Howbout an abrogration of the Constitution?

Teh Fred can get you in on the ground floor, baby!
K-Bob
December 9th, 2011 @ 5:37 pm

Somebody has to get it. Think, people!
Quartermaster
December 9th, 2011 @ 6:47 pm

One change I would have no problem with is awarding electoral votes based on congressional district, rather than winner take all on the state level.
AngelaTC
December 9th, 2011 @ 7:51 pm

It’s scary stuff, Smitty. At our most recent county GOP meeting, we asked one of our state reps about it. He told us that there’s a big push for it in the GOP, and that while he isn’t planning on supporting it, the people making the pitch are making it sound like a great idea. Saul Anuzis, the former head of our GOP, is very involved here in trying to get this passed in Michigan. ( Y0u might know the name – he ran for the head of the RNC last time around out.)

And what depresses me is that because it’s a liberal initiative, its as good as done. They never, ever give up.

After that, it will be a short amount of time before the GOP talks about repealing it…until they get into office, that is.

After that, I’ll frequently get accused of being a liberal when I point out that it wasn’t always this way, and that it is a bad, bad plan for those of us in flyover country.

I’d be willing to bet that the World’s Youngest Blogger will never see firsthand how the electoral college was supposed to work.
Kevin s.
December 9th, 2011 @ 8:52 pm

I am conservative, and I support the plan. I won’t try to make a comprehensive case here, but I would like to address the fraud issue.

Generally speaking, fraud thrives when a small number of bad actors can have an outsize impact while leaving a minimal paper trail.

Under the present system, a small coalition, let’s call it WALNUT, can target a small number of urban areas in swing states. If WALNUT successfully manufactures a small number of votes in Madison, Cleveland, Miami and Las Vegas, there is a good chance they will swing the election.

Under National Popular Vote, they would have to find a way to manufacture hundreds of thousands of votes. That is almost impossible to do without leaving a paper trail.

As a conservative (and I am one, as are Tancredo and Thompson and Anuzis) I don’t think it makes sense to continue supporting a winner-take-all system that allows candidates to narrowly focus on swing voters in a small handful of states. The present system ignores small states, red states, blue states, and just about every voter who has a strong conviction about how the country should be run.

That isn’t right.
Charles
December 9th, 2011 @ 9:49 pm

That a credible argument for a Consitutional amendment, but implementing NPV as a multi-state compact is what’s on the table. And you have to ask, are those blue states really going to award their electoral votes to a Republican, if that’s what the compact calls for? Or are they going to find some way to break their word?
Jakobin
December 9th, 2011 @ 10:42 pm

“Anyone in favor of NPV is either on the wrong side or hasn’t thought it through fully.”
It’s interesting to hear that you have a perfect opinion, Smitty, but it would be even more interesting if you were to say WHY it’s perfect.
The theory behind the electoral college is that regular folks can only be trusted to elect the political insiders who elect the president, and not to elect the president himself. This theory was devised, of course, by the political insiders.
In practice, the electoral college increases the influence of the least populous states and dilutes the influence of the most populous ones. Some specific examples: the 2008 allocation of electors almost tripled the voting power of Vermont and the District of Columbia compared to their population, while discounting Florida and Texas by 17 and 22 percent, respectively.
The Constitution lets every state handle their electoral votes however the hell they want. Some states allocate all their electors to the candidate who wins 50 percent plus 1 more vote. Other states divide their electors among the candidates according to the popular vote (which negates the whole point of the electoral college). Electors are bound to the will of the voters in some states, but almost half of them are legally free to vote for Andrew Sullivan, Oprah Winfrey, or Kim Kardashian, as the whim strikes them.
Pop quiz for you Smitty: who did you elect in 2008 to be the “sanity check” on your political freedoms? If you don’t know who your presidential elector was and how they were better qualified than you to pick the president, it’s pretty absurd to call critics of the system ignoramuses.
In 2008, McCain came within sight of a majority of the popular vote but wasn’t even close in the electoral college. That’s a reminder of the bombshell potential of the electoral college: it’s mathematically possible to win the presidency with only a little over 25 percent of the popular vote. And an electoral college tie throws the decision to the bozos in Congress, whom Smitty seems to regard as our National Sanity Reserve. In 2008, a tie would have let Nancy Pelosi pick the president. Yeah, nobody can possibly argue with that, Smitty.
Jakobin
December 9th, 2011 @ 10:52 pm

Some states already do it this way, because the Constitution allows each state to decide how to allocate its electoral votes. That’s part of the problem with the electoral college: there are no rules for how electors are allocated.
ThePaganTemple
December 9th, 2011 @ 11:15 pm

A national popular vote, huh? Bullshit, I’d rather they went back to picking electors the old fashioned way, via the state legislatures sending them to Washington to cast their votes. You don’t like it? Then make damn sure you show up to vote for your state legislators. This shit is just another way to take power away from the people by taking it away from their states, that way they can turn us all into one big homogenized national gloop of brain dead populists. SCREW THAT!
Finrod Felagund
December 10th, 2011 @ 12:58 am

Nebraska and Maine do this. That’s how Obama got one electoral vote out of Nebraska in 2008.

I had heard that Pennsylvania was considering this, which would be great for Republicans if so, since Pennsylvania has gone blue the last several elections.
mvy
December 10th, 2011 @ 2:12 am

The Electoral College is now the set of dedicated party activists who vote as rubberstamps for presidential candidates. In the current presidential
election system, 48 states award all of their electors to the winners of their
state.

The Founding Fathers in the Constitution did not require states to allow their citizens to vote for president, much less award all their electoral votes based upon the vote of their citizens.

The presidential election system we have today is not in the Constitution, and enacting National Popular Vote would
not need an amendment. State-by-state winner-take-all laws to award Electoral
College votes, were eventually enacted by states, using their exclusive power to do so, AFTER the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution. Now our current system can be changed by state laws again.

Unable to agree on any particular method for selecting presidential electors, the Founding Fathers left the
choice of method exclusively to the states in section 1 of Article II of the U.S. Constitution– “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors . . .” The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly
characterized the authority of the state legislatures over the manner of
awarding their electoral votes as “plenary” and “exclusive.”

The constitution does not prohibit any of the methods that were debated and rejected. Indeed, a majority of the states appointed their presidential electors using two of the rejected methods in the nation’s first presidential election in 1789 (i.e., appointment by the legislature and
by the governor and his cabinet).
Presidential electors were appointed by state legislatures for almost a century.

Neither of the two most important
features of the current system of electing the President (namely, universal suffrage, and the 48 state-by-state winner-take-all method) are in the U.S. Constitution. Neither was the choice of the Founders when they went back to their states to organize the nation’s first presidential election.

In 1789, in the nation’s first election, the people had no vote for President in most states, only men who owned a substantial amount of property could vote, and only three states used the state-by-state winner-take-all method to award electoral votes.

The current 48 state-by-state winner-take-all method (i.e., awarding all of a state’s electoral votes to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in a particular state) is not entitled to any special deference based on history or the historical meaning of the words in the U.S. Constitution. It is not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, the debates of the Constitutional Convention, or the Federalist Papers. The actions taken by the Founding Fathers make it clear that they never gave their imprimatur to the winner-take-all method.

The constitutional wording does not encourage, discourage, require, or prohibit the use of any particular method for awarding the state’s electoral votes.
As a result of changes in state laws enacted since 1789, the people have the right to vote for presidential electors
in 100% of the states, there are no property requirements for voting in any
state, and the state-by-state winner-take-all method is used by 48 of the 50 states. States can, and frequently have, changed their method of awarding electoral votes over the years. Maine and Nebraska do not use the winner-take-all method– a reminder that an amendment to the U.S. Constitution is not required to change the way the President is elected.

The normal process of effecting change
in the method of electing the President is specified in the U.S. Constitution, namely action by the state legislatures. This is how the current system was created, and this is the built-in method that the Constitution provides for making changes. The abnormal process is to go outside the Constitution, and amend it.
mvy
December 10th, 2011 @ 2:17 am

The bill says: “Any member state may
withdraw from this agreement, except that a withdrawal occurring six months or
less before the end of a President’s term shall not become effective until a
President or Vice President shall have been qualified to serve the next term.”

Any attempt by a state to pull out of the compact in violation of its terms would violate the Impairments Clause of the U.S.
Constitution and would be void. Such an
attempt would also violate existing federal law. Compliance would be enforced by Federal court action
mvy
December 10th, 2011 @ 2:20 am

Dividing a state’s electoral votes by congressional
district winners would magnify the worst features of the Electoral College system.

If the district approach were used nationally, it would be less fair and less accurately reflect the will of the people than the current system. In 2004, Bush won 50.7% of the popular vote, but 59% of the districts. Although Bush lost the national popular vote in 2000, he won 55% of the country’s congressional districts.

The district approach would not provide incentive for presidential candidates to campaign in a particular state or focus the candidates’ attention to issues of concern to the state. With the 48 state-by-state winner-take-all laws (whether applied to either districts or states), candidates have no reason to campaign in districts or states where they are comfortably ahead or hopelessly behind. In North Carolina, for example, there are only 2 districts (the 13th with a 5% spread and the 2nd with an 8% spread) where the presidential race is competitive. In California, the presidential race was competitive in only 3 of the state’s 53 districts. Nationwide, there have been only 55 “battleground” districts that were competitive in presidential elections. With the present deplorable 48 state-level winner-take-all system, 2/3rds of the states
(including California and Texas) are ignored in presidential elections; however, 88% of the nation’s congressional districts would be ignored if a district-level winner-take-all system were
used nationally.

Awarding electoral votes by congressional
district could result in third party candidates winning electoral votes that would deny either major party candidate the necessary majority vote of electors and throw the process into Congress to decide.

Because there are generally more close votes on district levels than states as whole, district elections increase the opportunity for error. The larger the voting base, the less opportunity there is for an especially close vote.

Also, a second-place candidate could still win the White House without winning the national popular vote.

A national popular vote is the way to make every person’s vote equal and matter to their candidate because it guarantees that the candidate who gets the most votes in all 50 states and DC becomes President.
mvy
December 10th, 2011 @ 2:25 am

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.

We do and would vote state by state. Each state manages its own election and is prepared to conduct a recount.

The state-by-state winner-take-all system is not a firewall, but instead causes unnecessary fires.

Given that there is a recount only once in about 160 statewide elections, and given there is a presidential election once every four years, one would expect a recount about once in 640 years with the National Popular Vote. The actual probability of a close national election would be even less than that because recounts are less likely with larger pools of votes.

The average change in the margin of victory as a result of a statewide recount was a mere 296 votes in a 10-year study of 2,884 elections.

No recount would have been warranted in any of the nation’s 56 previous presidential elections if the outcome had been based on the nationwide count.

The common nationwide date for meeting of the Electoral College has been set by federal law as the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December. With both the current system and the National Popular Vote approach, all counting, recounting, and judicial proceedings must be conducted so as to reach a “final determination” prior to the meeting of the Electoral College.
mvy
December 10th, 2011 @ 2:30 am

In 1969, The U.S. House of Representatives voted for a
national popular vote by a 338–70 margin.   It was endorsed by Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, and Bob Dole.

Jason Cabel Roe, a lifelong conservative activist and professional political consultant wrote in National
Popular Vote is Good for Republicans: “I strongly support National Popular Vote. It is good for Republicans, it is good for conservatives . . . , and it is good for America.    National Popular Vote is not a grand conspiracy hatched by the Left to manipulate the
election outcome.

It is a bipartisan effort of Republicans, Democrats, and
Independents to allow every state – and every voter – to have a say in the selection of our President, and not just the 15 Battle Ground States.

National Popular Vote is not a change that can be easily
explained, nor the ramifications thought through in sound bites. It takes a keen political mind to understand just how much it can help . . . Republicans.
. . . Opponents either have a knee-jerk reaction to the idea or don’t fully understand it. . . . We believe that the more exposure and discussion the reform has the more support that will build for it.”
http://tinyurl.com/3z5brge

Rich Bolen, a Constitutional scholar, attorney at law, and Republican Party Chairman for Lexington County, South Carolina, wrote:”A Conservative Case for National
Popular Vote: Why I support a state-based plan to reform the Electoral College.”
http://tinyurl.com/7bz8uqc

Some other supporters who wrote forewords to “Every
Vote Equal: A State-Based Plan for Electing the President by National Popular Vote ” http://www.every-vote-equal.com/ include:

Laura Brod served in the Minnesota House of Representatives from 2003 to 2010 and was the ranking
Republican member of the Tax Committee. She is the Minnesota Public Sector Chair for ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) and active in the
Council of State Governments.

James Brulte served as Republican Leader of the California State Assembly from 1992 to 1996, California State Senator from 1996 to 2004, and Senate Republican leader from 2000 to 2004.

Ray Haynes served as the National Chairman of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in 2000. He served in the California State Senate from 1994 to 2002 and was elected to the Assembly in 1992 and 2002

Dean Murray is a member of the New York State Assembly. He was a Tea Party organizer before being
elected to the Assembly as a Republican, Conservative Party member in February 2010. He was described by Fox News as the first Tea Party candidate elected to office in the United States.

Thomas L. Pearce served as a Michigan State Representative from 2005–2010 and was appointed Dean of the Republican Caucus. He has led several faith-based initiatives in Lansing
mvy
December 10th, 2011 @ 2:35 am

In Gallup polls since 1944, only about 20% of the public has supported the current system of awarding all of a state’s electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each separate state (with about 70% opposed and about 10% undecided). Support for a national popular vote is strong among Republicans, Democrats, and Independent voters, as well as every
demographic group in virtually every state surveyed in recent polls in closely divided Battleground states: CO – 68%, FL – 78%, IA 75%, MI – 73%, MO – 70%, NH – 69%, NV – 72%, NM– 76%, NC – 74%, OH – 70%, PA – 78%, VA – 74%, and WI – 71%; in Small states (3 to 5 electoral votes): AK – 70%, DC – 76%, DE – 75%, ID – 77%, ME – 77%, MT – 72%, NE 74%, NH – 69%, NV – 72%, NM – 76%, OK – 81%, RI -74%, SD – 71%, UT – 70%, VT – 75%, WV – 81%, and WY – 69%; in Southern and Border states: AR – 80%,, KY- 80%, MS – 77%, MO – 70%, NC – 74%, OK – 81%, SC – 71%, TN – 83%, VA – 74%, and WV – 81%; and in other states polled: CA – 70%, CT – 74%, MA – 73%, MN – 75%, NY – 79%, OR – 76%, and WA – 77%. Americans believe that the candidate who receives the most votes should win.
Bosun349
December 10th, 2011 @ 7:38 am

It provides a final sanity check.

Sanity
check my eye. The idea that the majority of the people in this country are too insane
to be trusted to pick their leaders is an anti-democratic anachronism. We should
do away with it, just like we did the original constitutional
disenfranchisement of slaves and Indians.

The
Electoral College is a fix for a non-existent problem. The “sanity check” you
refer to happens only when the Electoral College frustrates the will of the
voters and seats a president who didn’t win the national popular vote. That’s only
happened three times: when the electors picked Rutherford Hayes over Samuel
Tilden, Benjamin Harrison over Grover Cleveland, and George Bush over Al Gore. To
say the national popular vote in those years was a manifestation of collective “insanity”
is stupid and un-American.

There
has been one instance in which a loser of both the national popular vote AND
the Electoral College vote became president. In 1824, the decision was thrown
to the House of Representatives, which delivered the infamous “corrupt bargain”
that put John Quincy Adams in office. Nice “sanity check,” huh?
Bosun349
December 10th, 2011 @ 7:58 am

And the means employed to enact the NPV, a state-level end-around ofArticle V of the Constitution, further underscores the doublethink involved in the discussion. Do this correctly, or do it not at all.

Article V does not deal with election of presidents, nor does it require a constitutional amendment for any change in the way states handle their electors. Article II gives the states full authority to decide how to assign their electors, and the states have been making changes to their elector policies without constitutional amendments for almost 200 years. There is no “correct” way specified in the constitution to handle how electors are chosen or who they vote for. NPV is constitution-compliant. Do the reading yourself.
ThePaganTemple
December 10th, 2011 @ 8:11 am

We’re not a pure democracy, and we’re never intended to be one. The electoral college is meant to insure we remain a constitutional republic. A drive toward a national popular vote is a method meant to turn us into a spoils system on steroids, and if it ever comes about, I for one refuse to participate.
ThePaganTemple
December 10th, 2011 @ 8:15 am

Bullshit. It’s intent is to make the states bow to the will of the majority in a national election. So if California votes Democrat, but the majority of the country vote Republican, then California’s electors will go to the Republican candidate. It’s unconstitutional on the face of it because it would be depriving California voters of the right to have their votes counted as citizens of the state of California, which is what the electoral college is meant to insure. Any judge that refuses to strike it down on constitutional grounds needs to be frog marched out the middle of Washington and drawn and quartered as far as I’m concerned. No, that’s not hyperbole!!
ThePaganTemple
December 10th, 2011 @ 8:24 am

It doesn’t have to be winner take all. The electors can be apportioned by district like in Nebraska, or divided up according to vote percentages like Maine. But the idea of negating the outcome of the election in a state and giving that state’s electors to the winner of the national popular vote, even if the national vote is the opposite of the state outcome, is unconstitutional on the face of it and yes, its a leftist socialist scheme to weaken the power of the states. If Kentucky ever does that, my voting days in national presidential elections are over and done. When I vote in an election I vote as a resident of the state of Kentucky, and I’ll be god motherucking damned if I’m going to participate in a scheme that sees my states electors given some piece of leftist shit the voters of my state didn’t intend for them to go to.
ThePaganTemple
December 10th, 2011 @ 8:29 am

By the way, if I had a bunch of spammers on my blogs comments advocating traitorous shit like this I’d ban them hint hint.
ThePaganTemple
December 10th, 2011 @ 8:58 am

It’s not supposed to reflect the “will of the people” its supposed to reflect the will of the voters in each state. Something you leftist dirtbags can’t stand because you know the more conservative states are your main obstacle to implementing your socialist totalitarian schemes. And we will keep doing so, one way or another. Count on it!!
ThePaganTemple
December 10th, 2011 @ 9:02 am

If you support this shit, you are not a conservative. It goes against the very concept of federalism, and its a leftist progressive scheme to deprive the states of their rights. If this ever comes about we might as well eliminate state borders, and drop the term “United States” and simply call it “America”, which will make it a construct I will have and exercise zero loyalty towards.
ThePaganTemple
December 10th, 2011 @ 9:10 am

It didn’t require a constitutional amendment to enact universal suffrage in a presidential election for the simple fact that universal suffrage does not minimize or negatively impact the influence of the states in a national election. If anything, universal suffrage enhances the impact of the states because it makes it more reflective of the will of the states citizens.

NPV does the exact opposite, it tells the citizens of the states in effect “we don’t give a crap about the individual states and how they vote, we’re going to give our electors to the national majority”, making us in effect a “pure democracy”. In other words, a motherfucking rabble.
mvy
December 10th, 2011 @ 2:06 pm

The Founding Fathers in the Constitution did not require states to allow their citizens to vote for president, much less award all their electoral votes based upon the vote of their citizens.

The presidential election system we have today is not in the Constitution State-by-state winner-take-all laws to award Electoral College votes, were eventually enacted by states, using their exclusive power to do so, AFTER the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution. Now our current system can be changed by state laws again.

Unable to agree on any particular
method for selecting presidential electors, the Founding Fathers left the
choice of method exclusively to the states in section 1 of Article II of the U.S. Constitution– “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors . . .” The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly
characterized the authority of the state legislatures over the manner of
awarding their electoral votes as “plenary” and “exclusive.”

In 1789, in the nation’s first election, the people had no vote for President in most states, only men who owned a substantial amount of property could vote, and only three states used the state-by-state winner-take-all method to award electoral votes.
mvy
December 10th, 2011 @ 2:11 pm

The National Popular Vote bill preserves the Electoral College and state control of elections. It changes the way electoral votes are awarded in the Electoral
College.

The Republic is not in any danger from National Popular Vote. It has nothing to do with direct democracy.

With National Popular Vote, citizens would not rule directly but, instead, continue to elect the President by a majority of Electoral College votes, to represent us and conduct the business of government in the periods between elections.
mvy
December 10th, 2011 @ 2:13 pm

With the Electoral College, and federalism, the Founding
Fathers meant to empower the states to pursue their own interest within the
confines of the Constitution. The National Popular Vote is an exercise of that
power, not an attack upon it.

The National Popular Vote bill preserves the Electoral
College and state control of elections.
It changes the way electoral votes are awarded in the Electoral
College.

The
current state-by-state winner-take-all method of awarding electoral votes
(not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but since enacted by 48 states), under
which all of a state’s electoral votes are awarded to the candidate who gets
the most votes in each separate state, ensures that the candidates, after
the primaries, in 2012 will not reach out to about 76% of the states and their
voters. Candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, campaign, or care
about the voter concerns in the dozens of states where they are safely ahead or
hopelessly behind.

More than 2/3rds of the states and people have been just
spectators to the presidential elections. That’s more than 85 million voters.

Policies important
to the citizens of ‘flyover’ states are not as highly prioritized as policies
important to ‘battleground’ states when it comes to governing.



States have the responsibility and power to make all of their
voters relevant in every presidential election and beyond.

Unable to agree on any
particular method, the Founding Fathers left the choice of method for selecting
presidential electors exclusively to the states by adopting the language
contained in section 1 of Article II of the U.S. Constitution– “Each
State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a
Number of Electors . . .”   The U.S.
Supreme Court has repeatedly characterized the authority of the state
legislatures over the manner of awarding their electoral votes as
“plenary” and “exclusive.”



Federalism concerns the allocation of power between
state governments and the national government.
The National Popular Vote
bill concerns how votes are tallied, not how much power state governments
possess relative to the national government.
The powers of state governments are neither increased nor decreased
based on whether presidential electors are selected along the state boundary
lines, or national lines (as with the National Popular Vote).
smitty
December 10th, 2011 @ 2:28 pm

who did you elect in 2008 to be the “sanity check” on your political freedoms?
Well, if you want to get down to it, 2008 was merely the capstone in the negative developments beginning in 1913, i.e. around the time my grandfather was born.

In 2008, McCain came within sight of a majority of the popular vote but wasn’t even close in the electoral college. That’s a reminder of the bombshell potential of the electoral college: it’s mathematically possible to win the presidency with only a little over 25 percent of the popular vote.
You actually are touching upon one of the features of the Electoral College here. Doing a chunk-wise tally at the State level of the vote not only makes the math simpler, but helps to legitimize whoever won by giving a decent gap in the score.
That is, the Office of the President would be diminished by having a 1% edge in the popular vote carrying the day.

Overall, the NPV is an attempt to attack the symptoms, without stepping back to consider the overall disease that has been Progressivism.
Bosun349
December 11th, 2011 @ 1:57 pm

Every other elective office in the country — from senator down to dogcatcher — is filled by the awful “pure democracy” method you say you won’t participate in. Governorships, statewide ballot initiatives, and even local zoning ordinances are all decided by a popular vote. If you truly believe the electoral form Americans use 99.99 percent of the time is evil, you should abstain from voting in everything except presidential elections.

So do you walk the walk? Or just talk the talk?
Bosun349
December 11th, 2011 @ 2:08 pm

it would be depriving California voters of the right to have their votes counted as citizens of the state of California

You’re ignoring the fact that California voters have chosen to have their presidential votes counted on the NPV basis.And just what would the constitutional grounds be for overturning the NPV compact? You really should read Article II before you start talking about what’s unconstitutional with regard to presidential electors. Article II gives the citizens of California the right allocate their electors any way they choose — including according to the NPV compact. Again, if you’re going to talk about what Article II requires, you should read it first.
Bosun349
December 11th, 2011 @ 2:22 pm

“Traitorous shit”? “Ban them”?

If the founding fathers had your regard for freedom of thought, they wouldn’t have founded anything — and they certainly never would have drafted the Bill of Rights.
Anonymous
December 11th, 2011 @ 4:13 pm

You obviously aren’t too familiar with the Rebels’ treatment of their Tory neighbors.