Without much fanfare, a movement to keep the Electoral College from undermining the popular vote in presidential elections is gaining ground. The drive for electoral votes that gave us a president not elected by popular vote in 2000—and that has turned presidential contests into electoral scoreboard games rather than quests for individual votes—needs to end, say supporters of the National Popular Vote bills now making their way through state legislatures.
The Massachusetts House just passed a National Popular Vote bill 114-35. The Senate was supposed to vote on it June 10, but the vote was tabled and not rescheduled. Last week the New York State Senate passed an NPV bill 51-7.
The National Popular Vote system calls for all electoral votes in participating states to go to the winner of the nationwide popular vote. It would mean that candidates can’t win the presidential election just by cornering the electoral votes in a relatively few states that have the most of them. Now they can do just that, because in most cases whoever wins the popular vote in a given state, even if they win by a narrow margin, gets all that state’s electoral votes.
Here is Common Cause’s explanation of why the election game needs to change: “Twelve of the 13 smallest states are completely sidelined in presidential elections because they are politically non-competitive. Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Alaska… and Rhode Island, Delaware, Hawaii, Vermont, Maine, and D.C… together contain 11 million people and have 40 electoral votes. Ohio has a comparable 11 million people and has ‘only’ 20 electoral votes, but the 11 million people in Ohio have significantly more influence in presidential elections than the 11 million people in the 12 non-competitive small states.”
The way presidential candidates lavish time on states with the largest numbers of electoral votes has become a well-known irritant in election seasons. With NPV, the votes of the 11 million people in the “non-competitive” states would count as much as the votes of the 11 million Ohioans.
The NPV system won’t come into effect until enough states sign on to it for their combined electoral votes to add up to 270, or more than half the total. So far five states with 23 percent of the total electoral vote—Illinois (21 electoral votes), Hawaii (4), Maryland (10), New Jersey (15) and Washington (11)—have passed NPV bills. The public in all parts of the country favors the National Popular Vote system by an average of 70 percent, Gallup polls show.
