Via The Corner, a warning that the National Popular Vote, the backdoor effort to eliminated the Electoral College, is dangerously close to succeeding:
If each of these states is counted, NPV could have as many as 169 electoral votes in favor of its plan. It needs 270. NPV has come startlingly close to success even as most Americans remain completely unaware that the presidential-election process is so close to being turned on its head.
The American presidential-election system is a unique blend of federalism and democracy, combining purely democratic state-level elections with a national election among the states. The practical effect of this system is that a candidate can't win unless he appeals to a wide variety of voters around the nation. NPV's plan tries to keep the democratic portions of the election, even as it strips the system of its federalist aspects. It fails, instead managing to lose both.
I wrote an editorial about NPV a few years ago because of the involvement of Birch Bayh, father of Evan who spent a lot of his engery as a senator trying to do away with the Electoral College. Here it is, from April 12, 2007:
If you can't get the Constitution amended - a deliberately complicated and laborious process - then just work around the pesky document. That's the strategy of Birch Bayh, still at his lifelong quest to replace the Electoral College with direct election of the president by popular vote. His attempt is starting to gain some traction, but it was a bad idea when he first proposed it nearly 40 years ago and remains a bad idea today. Dumping the electoral system would create far more harm than good.
Bayh, father of Indiana's junior U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh, first proposed a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College when he was a senator, in 1970. It passed the House that year but failed in the Senate. The same thing happened in 1979.
But he has been pushing the idea ever since. Lately, he has been working as an unpaid lobbyist in Maryland, working for passage there of the National Popular Vote Plan, which was approved and, this week, signed by the governor. It requires Maryland's 10 electoral votes to be awarded to whichever presidential candidate wins the national popular vote. But the plan will go into effect only if states representing a majority of the nation's 538 electoral votes decide to make the same change. If that happens, the Electoral College becomes superfluous, and the winner of the popular vote will be the person who becomes president.
The most obvious problem is that Maryland legislators have just voted to potentially disenfranchise Maryland voters. If a majority of them vote for Candidate A, their electors would nevertheless go to Candidate B if that's what a majority in the rest of the nation said.
But there are other problems as well.
When Bayh's amendment was first being debated, points out political columnist David Broder, "the seemingly simple argument for direct democracy was tested by consideration of the many unintended consequences of switching to a national popular vote plan. Senators asked what it would do to rural and urban constituencies, small states and large, minority populations and the two-party system. In the final vote in the Senate in 1979, it was defeated by a coalition of Northern liberals and Southern conservatives in his own party as well as Republicans - all of whom found things to dislike."
Those concerns remain today.
The first thing to go after the Electoral College is likely to be the two-party system. Because they have to compete for blocks of electoral votes in each state and get a majority of them, the two parties have to be large and well-financed. They also have to select candidates who, in the general election, will appeal to the broadest range of voters. If a candidate has only to get the most popular votes of those cast, we are likely to see a presidential race with dozens of candidates. The winner could be someone with only a third of the votes cast. If you really like the idea of the popular vote, look how it has played out in France. In the last national election, there were 13 candidates, the top three getting barely half the vote among them. If you think we have a divided nation today, just wait.
And if you think the recount mess in Florida was a real fiasco, imagine a fight like that in multiple jurisdictions in multiple states every election. If only the popular vote counts, every single ballot will be fought over in every precinct with a close vote. Think Indiana is ignored by the candidates now? Wait until they decide they don't have to go to any small state. If the popular vote is what counts, the politicians will go mostly where the most votes are, which means large urban centers largely on the coasts. Look for national politics to become even more liberal than they are today.
"One person, one vote" - it sounds like such an appealing idea. How can we be for democracy and not support such simple fairness?
Because this never was a pure democracy and was never meant to be. We live in a republic, with the "will of the people" one step removed from those in power. The Electoral College is one part of an intricate web of checks and balances meant to keep power in check and the current whims of the majority somewhere between the front and back burners.
The National Popular Vote Plan is gaining steam in large part because of the disputed election of 2000, in which George W. Bush lost the popular vote but won the election. But that was only the fourth time in the nation's history such a thing happened. Doing an end-run around the Electoral College is too drastic a move for so rare a "problem."
