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Back in May of this year, Jason drew our attention to former Senator and GOP Presidential candidate Fred Thompson, and his support for the ‘National Popular Vote’ movement. Basically this jist is that these folks are trying to pursue a Constitutional amendment which will do away with the Electoral College and replace it with a direct popularity vote. In other words, the candidate for President garnering the most votes wins.
Well Gallup, unbeknownst to me, has actually tracked popular sentiment towards this issue throughout the years. And with the Gore v. Bush debacle in 2000 still relatively fresh in most Americans’ minds the outcome of their latest polling data shouldn’t be all that surprising.
Related articles
- Americans Overwhelmingly Want the Electoral College Eliminated (elections.firedoglake.com)
- Most Americans want popular presidential vote (cbsnews.com)
- Most in U.S. would scrap Electoral College (gunnyg.wordpress.com)
- 62% of Americans say they want to end the electoral college system (100gf.wordpress.com)
- NPV & Electoral College ??? (2012patriot.wordpress.com)
I’m not a great fan of the electoral college, but the idea of a nation-wide popular vote has some downsides that are worth considering. The two main ones I am concerned about are the possibility of cheating and indecisive elections. Local and state-wide “winner take all” elections are a good way of firewalling off individual locations so that they cannot be easily corrupted. Imagine for example the difference between some fake vote manufacturing operation going on in the most corrupt city in the country. They could generate say, a million fake votes for their favorite candidate or “lose” a million votes for the opponent and that million votes would flow all the way to the bottom line in the nationwide election. That could easily tip a close election one way or another. By contrast, in a winner take all scheme, the machine politics that allow one party to dominate the local vote counting will also likely mean that the majority of that city would go for the candidate anyway and thus cheating by even a million fake votes one way or another would likely have no impact on the overall election.
The other issue is indecisive elections. We saw just a hint of what can happen with the Bush v. Gore case, but imagine how things would have gone if instead of just one state’s vote being so close, it was a popular vote across the country! We would have been counting hanging chads from Maine to San Diego and the worst part is that the most corrupt districts would likely end up winning the day rather than the cleanest ones.
How about this as an alternative. Every county collects ballots and counts them. If there is a majority for candidate A in that county then the county is taken to vote for that candidate with its population. Each state tallies up the weighted votes of each of its counties and declares a winner of that state and its votes (weighted by population) go to the candidate in question (or you could skip that and just make the counties be the units of counting at the national level). Then the candidate with the highest weighted vote count wins. There’s no need to recounts and court cases to settle things except in the most weird cases.
We also have some other clarifications that could help us work out strange cases that the current law to my knowledge doesn’t address such as when a candidate dies either before, during, or after the election. All kinds of strange things have happened in the past like dead people being elected or their wives taking over their seats. I think that’s all madness. It should be clearly spelled out in advance so that there’s no hassle in an emergency.
I don’t know why this should need to come up at this moment though. Of all of the things wrong with the government the electoral college is the very least of our problems. How about simply following the Constitution? Perhaps we could pass an amendment that would call fo that. I wonder if anybody would care about that enough to even notice.
Looking for a reform project? Let’s get the commerce cause, the necessary and proper clause, and the general welfare clause proper definitions that the courts can enforce rather than just leaving them as open invitations for totalitarianism.
Brian,
I am with you. At first glance I am not a very big fan of the E.C, either. However, when you take a step back and think about it, it is a fairly efficient system. Out of the forty plus elections we have had, if memory serves me correctly, only twice has the system not worked. In that only twice, the national popular vote results didn’t match up to the EC results. That’s not bad. Additionally I think you make a great point about the potential for corruption with the NPV. Still this is a pretty ludicrous issue when you consider the economic problems we are facing.
The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC).
The National Popular Vote bill preserves the constitutionally mandated Electoral College and state control of elections. It changes the way electoral votes are awarded by states in the Electoral College, instead of the current 48 state-by-state winner-take-all system. It assures that every vote is equal and that every voter will matter in every state in every presidential election, as in virtually every other election in the country.
Under National Popular Vote, every vote, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in every presidential election. Every vote would be included in the national count. The candidate with the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC would get the 270+ electoral votes from the enacting states. That majority of electoral votes guarantees the candidate with the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC wins the presidency.
National Popular Vote would give a voice to the minority party voters in each state and district (in ME and NE). Now their votes are counted only for the candidate they did not vote for. Now they don’t matter to their candidate. With National Popular Vote, elections wouldn’t be about winning states or districts (in ME and NE). No more distorting and divisive red and blue state maps. Every vote, everywhere would be counted equally for and directly assist the candidate for whom it was cast.
A candidate has won the Presidency without winning the most popular votes nationwide in 4 of the nation’s 56 (1 in 14 = 7%) presidential elections. The precariousness of the current state-by-state winner-take-all system is highlighted by the fact that a shift of a few thousand voters in one or two states would have elected the second-place candidate in 4 of the 13 presidential elections since World War II. Near misses are now frequently common. There have been 6 consecutive non-landslide presidential elections (1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, and 2008). A shift of 60,000 voters in Ohio in 2004 would have defeated President Bush despite his nationwide lead of over 3 million votes.
The current state-by-state winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes maximizes the incentive and opportunity for fraud. A very few people can change the national outcome by changing a small number of votes in one closely divided battleground state. With the current system all of a state’s electoral votes are awarded to the candidate who receives a bare plurality of the votes in each state. The sheer magnitude of the national popular vote number, compared to individual state vote totals, is much more robust against manipulation.
National Popular Vote would limit the benefits to be gained by fraud. One fraudulent vote would only win one vote in the return. In the current electoral system, one fraudulent vote could mean 55 electoral votes, or just enough electoral votes to win the presidency without having the most popular votes in the country.
Hendrik Hertzberg wrote: “To steal the closest popular-vote election in American history, you’d have to steal more than a hundred thousand votes . . .To steal the closest electoral-vote election in American history, you’d have to steal around 500 votes, all in one state. . . .
For a national popular vote election to be as easy to switch as 2000, it would have to be two hundred times closer than the 1960 election–and, in popular-vote terms, forty times closer than 2000 itself.
Which, I ask you, is an easier mark for vote-stealers, the status quo or N.P.V.[National Popular Vote]? Which offers thieves a better shot at success for a smaller effort?”
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.
A nationwide recount would not happen. We do and would vote state by state. Each state manages its own election and 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.
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