A National Popular Vote Compact is fine, but the states involved need to understand that if there’s any confusion over who won the popular vote, states that did not sign on are under no obligation to do recounts. So they need to have a plainly stated out in case it comes to that.
Which would be fine. I agree that it would probably be okay if elections were decided by popular vote, just so long as the EC remained as a sort of tiebreaker. I think the EC is a much better tiebreaker option than a national recount, which would bring nothing but hard feelings and suspicions of cheating and stealing elections. In the event there’s a tie in the popular vote, or near enough, then if one candidate has over 300 electoral votes, I’d say that’s more than good enough.
The NPV has been endorsed by Newt Gingrich andBob Barr, and, to the extent that he is able to express a coherent thought, Donald Trump favors a national popular vote, though he hasn’t specifically endorsed the NPV compact.
By definition, a compact doesn’t obligate any State that doesn’t sign on to do anything. And States which did sign the NPV wouldn’t lose their right to manage counts and recounts according to their own laws.
Recounts always engender hard feelings and suspicion; remember 2000? But I don’t think people who lived outside Florida were any less worked up about the situation than people in Florida were. The EC system offers 51 separate votes in each Presidential election, each of which have the potential for a disputed outcome. Under NPV, there is only one, much larger, pool of voters, so the chance of a recount being required is much, much smaller than with the EC system.
If the compact members are the only ones doing recounts there will definitely be some hard feelings. Plus there’s a legal issue with doing recounts if the rules aren’t explict in the compact. Why would California be recounting its votes when the Democrats won by 4 million? Recounts in California are only authorized if the vote is within a certain percentage. They’d have to remember to change that.
Every State has the right under the Constitution to regulate its own elections, including regulations pertaining to recounts. Nothing in NPV changes that. Presumably States, whether members of the compact or not, would wish to change their laws to provide for recounts in the case of a close Presidential vote, even if the vote in their own State wasn’t close. But that is entirely up to the discretion of each State, and no plausible “legal issues” would arise from any State’s decision to change its laws, or to not do so.
“No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State”
States could do this on their own if they wanted. But the NPV is a compact between states, which would require approval from Congress.
This is a classic example of someone coming up with an absolutely horrendous “solution” to a real problem which does need to be addressed.
As described, this would tell all Oregon voters: “it doesn’t matter who you vote for or want. Whoever the REST of the country likes, we’ll pretend that’s who you voted for.”
It’s just plain stupid, and worst of all, in an attempt to solve a problem where Democracy was defeated by the structure of the system, the proposed “solution” is to ignore Democracy entirely.
The main thing that gets ignored or is overlooked, whenever a discussion of the Electoral system and how we ought to do away with is, is that in order to do that, we have to completely reboot the entire United States Government.
This is a REPUBLIC. Not a Democracy. The reason for the Electoral system, is to empower the STATES, as being members of that Republic. That’s why most states award ALL electors to whoever wins the popular vote in the state, even if they only win 50.00000001% to 49.99999999%.
The entire system of rights and the Constitution itself is based on the Republic model. So whatever people propose, they need to be aware that they could well end up making a LOT more changes to the government than they realize they are doing.
No, because that really would amount to throwing that State’s influence over the election away. That’s like saying “if a State was really serious about single-payer health care, it would pay for health care for everyone in the country”.
The Constitution (Art I Sec 10 cl 3) does literally say that all interstate compacts require Congressional approval, but SCOTUS, most recently in US Steel Corp vs Multistate Tax Commission, 1978, has ruled that this applies only to compacts which encroach on Federal authority. Since the right to choose how to appoint Presidential electors is explicitly given entirely to each State (Art I sec 1 cl 2), there is no issue.
Right. What happened in 2000 is that a vote was too close to call, and partisan judges were able to put their thumbs on the scale and get their guy in. This was the second time in US history (1876) that this happened. So this isn’t some theoretical danger that might happen if we tamper with the system, this is how it works now! And although the NPV system wouldn’t entirely remove the possibility of such a thing happening, it would make it much, much less likely. The EC system has hinged on disputed recounts twice already, and delivered the Presidency to the wrong candidate five times…with many other close calls. Never yet in US history (since 1828, when the popular vote was first recorded) has there been an election in which the popular vote was too close to be definitively called.
PS It doesn’t affect your basic point – that political/judicial shenanigans can happen in close elections – but as I explained to** Fotheringay-Phipps** above, the exact scenario you describe couldn’t happen. If a judicial determination was made that the national popular vote winner couldn’t be definitively identified, the electoral votes of NPV member States would be determined by their respective Legislatures.
Quite the contrary; this would tell all voters (in Oregon and in the rest of the country alike) that all of their votes all count equally. This would in fact give Oregonians more say in the election, not less, because they’re currently one of the many states that is ignored for not being a “swing state”.
And I find it quite amusing that, in the same post, you complain about this proposal not being democratic enough, and then go on to decry democracy with the “republic, not a democracy” nonsense.
I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that “compact”= treaty only if it’s formal and enforced like a treaty. Whereas many of our “treaties” are actually just agreements that got a simple majority vote in Congress and are not actually the law of the land. I think it probably works the same way for states. In a formal compact, states would have to allocate their electoral votes according to the rules, and that would probably require Congress’ consent. But if they just make an “agreement”, then they can do it, but it’s probably not enforceable. And we all know how much you can trust state governments if they can get their way by breaking the agreement.
It’s not an “agreement”. It’s state level electoral law that would of course be enforceable.
igor frankenstein, don’t know if you missed but this rule would only kick in if enough states have passed the legislation. So Oregan votes would matter just as much as anyone else’s even if Oregon’s electoral votes must go to the party they didn’t lean towards.
I don’t understand why it’s not just done by percentages. Forget about the 270 needed. If there are 2 candidates and one gets 75% of the popular vote in a given state, they get 75% of the votes, the other candidate 25%. Don’t announce any results until all 50 states have divided up their votes and the winner is the one with the most.
Oversimplified and I know in reality it wouldn’t work, but it seems like a fair way to do it as opposed to winner take all.
Just to be clear: Are you proposing national popular vote? Or just allocating a state’s current ev’s proportionally? In the latter case, be aware that each Wyoming voter will carry more than three times the weight of a California voter.
By the plain language of the Compact Clause, yes. Under the case law interpreting the Clause, no, not really.
U.S. Steel and its predecessors have basically made the Compact Clause a nullity except as to agreements between states and foreign countries. In any event, Congress has generally declined to bother granting or withholding approval of state compacts since, oh, around the Civil War.
… and which imposes a binding, reciprocal obligation on each adopting state, and which is only effective upon ratification by a sufficient number of states. It’s certainly an agreement between states, no matter that it is implemented at the level of the individual states. Otherwise you might as well argue that the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty is “national level law” rather than an agreement because the signatories had to pass enabling legislation.
