Blue States Ready to Subvert Electoral College
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact means the winner takes all votes
by Lewis Morris
Rather than produce a top-quality presidential candidate who loves America and respects the Constitution, Democrats are working on a way to circumvent the Electoral College, the method by which we have elected presidents of the United States since 1789. Article 2, Section 1 lays out the system. But like most other aspects of constitutional Rule of Law, leftists hold it in contempt.
The movement is called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, and late last month it suckered in Colorado to join its ranks. Democrat Gov. Jared Polis said he would sign the bill, making Colorado the 13th state to join.
“I’ve long supported electing the president by who gets the most votes,” Gov. Polis said. “It’s a way to move towards direct election of the president.”
Sorry, Governor, but you are woefully misinformed. “Direct” election of the president is exactly what we don’t want. It wasn’t a goal in the Constitution, and it shouldn’t be a goal now. Had we gone that way in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have become president on the strength of her vote totals based almost exclusively on a handful of major urban hubs. Certainly not a candidate representative of the whole nation.
Leftists would love a national popular vote for president. It would most assuredly give rise to greater voter fraud, further fracturing of the political system, and, despite leftist claims, reduced power of individual votes.
The weapon of choice in their effort to destroy one of our last vestiges of federalism is the Compact. You may recall that the Compact, which began in 2007, calls on its state signatories to pledge their electoral votes in presidential elections to whichever candidate wins the national popular vote.
The Compact goes into effect when there are enough states on board to reach 270 electoral votes. It currently has 181. It’s unlikely to reach the magic number by the 2020 election, but it hopes to be a game changer by 2024. Fortunately, the Compact has pretty much exhausted the pool of true-blue states, making the going tougher for states with split legislatures that are solid red. Republican voters in general don’t have a problem with the Electoral College.
Leftist attempts to abolish the Electoral College are not rooted in concern for individual votes or democracy or anything else. This is evident in the hypocrisy of their scheme and the reasoning behind it.
According to the Compact, states will award electors to whomever wins the popular vote, even if that state voted for another candidate. By definition, this goes against the stated purpose of the Compact: to see that everyone’s votes are counted. Of course, 12 of the 13 states pledged to the compact all voted for both Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016. (Colorado voted for George W. Bush in 2000 and is the first state to join the Compact that has voted for a Republican presidential candidate at least once in the last 19 years.)
These states are reliably blue in recent decades and for the foreseeable future, so it may seem that there isn’t really much at stake. But what about states that are purple, or even red? What would you think as a voter if the majority of your state voted for one candidate, but the state decided that, since the other candidate won the national vote, your vote was being awarded to someone you did not support? You wouldn’t feel like your vote mattered, that’s for sure.
If anything, 2016 proves that we do need an Electoral College. Clinton almost had it locked up by campaigning in only a handful of urban areas — mostly the big blue vote buckets like LA, NYC, Chicago, and San Francisco.
None of this can be explained to leftists, though. They cannot win in the arena of ideas, so they want to change the rules of the game. So far, they have been very clever about exploiting the so-called problems of the Electoral College. The first thing to remember is that there is no problem with the Electoral College. Except if you are a Democrat who can only win by pitting segments of the nation against one another.
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(TLB) published this article from The Patriot Post with our appreciation for the coverage.
About the author Lewis Morris
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