There’s a huge change underway in the process of electing a President. I happened to stumble upon this N&O article announcing North Carolina’s proposed plans to offer all of its electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. The plan calls for state officials to tally the popular votes from all of the 50 states and the District of Columbia and offer all of its electoral votes to the winner of that tally.
The plan, called the National Popular Vote compact, would give smaller states like North Carolina more clout in presidential elections. Campaigns currently focus most all of their resources on the battleground states. This plan would change all that. North Carolina joins California, Illinois, Colorado, Maryland, Hawaii, and Arkansas in advancing the measure through its legislature.
State representatives have been falling over themselves to introduce the measure. Bills from Sen. Charlie Dannelly (S760) and Sen. Dan Clodfelter (S954) are moving through the Senate, while Rep. Melanie Goodwin’s (H1645) is working its way through the House.
More on the plan can be found at the National Popular Vote website, or the book Every Vote Equal, appropriately available online for free.
If states implement the National Popular Vote measure, no longer would a presidential candidate win the popular vote but lose the election. Makes sense to me!
That means states like FL, NY and CA would rule our election process…so it doesn’t matter what NC residents vote for? WTF? This is a ridiculous and scary idea…NC residents would get screwed by this! God, I hope you’re not serious in thinking this is a good idea…
The framers of the Constitution knew that some states would have more people and could influence the elections and thought that was wrong. Therefore they came up with the current system…for example, my home state of Connecticut would be absolutely insignificant (not saying it shouldn’t be, btw 🙂 ). They didn’t want a situation where candidates wouldn’t campaign in certain states because they didn’t matter…if this passes, why would anyone campaign in Alaska or North Dakota or any other state with a small population.
Dude, I’m sorry but this is one of the most heinous ideas ever. And I know its because of the whole Bush backlash but geez, the system is what it is for a reason. I think James Madison and Thomas Jefferson understood these things better than you or me and I’m gonna trust them.
Please, reconsider your support for this…
Nobody campaigns in Alaska or North Dakota now. They have nothing to lose. And states like Florida, California and New York already do rule our elections.
It’s called democracy, dude. Everyone’s vote counts equally and the majority rules. Direct elections also encourage the participation of third parties, like, oh, the Libertarian Party, for instance. Wouldn’t it be great to get some new voices involved?
But maybe you’re happy with the status quo. I don’t know.
Pure democracy is something that the founding fathers were very much against, and it is not a system we should be moving towards.
Instead, it would perhaps be more fair to break up our state’s electoral votes to go proportionately to the candidates that are running. If the people vote 60/40 for the top 2 candidates, the electoral votes should be split 60/40 as well. Where this gets interesting is when you start adding in the third party candidates, which can actually start getting electoral votes and begin to break the two-party gridlock.
Handing our electoral votes to voters in other states will make us vulnerable to election fraud happening in other states. If Florida’s system is a joke, why should we give Florida a say in where our electoral votes go?
Also, North Carolina is culturally a much different state than, say, California. By letting California voters water down North Carolina votes, we’re actually reducing the value of each vote by a North Carolinian.
This would effectively give more power to states with larger voter turnout.
And do I even need to go into the part about relinquishing state sovereignty?
It’s all for me blog, me holly jolly blog.