Breaking the Constitution – National Popular Vote Interstate Compact

Your statements about the U.S. Constitution are either flawed or deliberately misleading.

The provisions in the U.S. Constitution under which the president is elected through a special vote of the House of Representatives weren't intended specifically for cases of "tie votes" in the Electoral College. The more likely scenario was that a presidential election involved more than two candidates, and none of the candidates won enough electoral votes to get a majority of votes in the Electoral College.

That may sound like an unlikely scenario, but that's exactly what happened in 1824. By all accounts, Andrew Jackson should have "won" that election. He had more electoral votes than John Quincy Adams (99-84), more popular votes by a wide margin (41% to 31%), and won more states (12 to 7).

And yet the election was decided in the House of Representatives because Jackson didn't win a majority of the electoral votes (he needed 131). William Crawford (41 electoral votes) and Henry Clay (37 electoral votes) won enough states to keep Jackson from winning a majority in the Electoral College. So Adams was elected president, Jackson went home the loser, and the nation survived.

And I have news for you: Even in a "national popular vote" scenario you're still going to end up with small numbers of states getting most of the attention. I don't see how a presidential election that is decided only by voters living within 500 miles of Columbus, Ohio is any improvement over the system that's been in place for more than two centuries. What happens if 25 different candidates get on the presidential ballot? If one candidate gets 8% of the vote nationwide and that's more than anyone else, does he/she win the election? How's that supposed to work?

There's a good reason why popular vote totals never mattered in the U.S. Constitution: When the Constitution was written, many states chose their electors through the state legislatures rather than a popular vote. Is there anything wrong with that?

One thing I do know for sure is that a national popular vote for a country full of idiots. As Barack Obama has demonstrated so clearly, the last thing this country needs is a president whose record of accomplishment looks like something I'd find in an 8th-grade class president.

There's nothing "precarious" about the current process of awarding electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis. That's what this country's presidential elections have been for more than 200 years. You can correct that system by simply having these states adopt a system like what you already have in Maine and Nebraska: where each state's electoral votes are allocated by Congressional district, with the state's two additional electoral votes cast for the overall winner of the state. That's how Maine and Nebraska can have 4-0 or 3-1 margins in the electoral college.

A better argument for the national popular vote is that it should be tied to the elimination of a highly irregular (and untenable, in my mind) situation in which apportionment in the House of Representatives (and, by extension, Electoral College votes) is determined by population without any regard for the legal status of a state's residents. This is a disgrace, and shouldn't be allowed to stand. California picked up six House seats at the expense of other states after the 2000 census even though something like 1 out of 7 residents in California isn't even a citizen of the United States.

Let's fix those problems before we run around trying to adopt some kind of idiotic "national popular vote" for the White House.

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