Posted on 04/11/2014 1:57:10 PM PDT by kingattax
Lawmakers line up behind plan that dumps Electoral College without constitutional amendment
The National Popular Vote effort, which could see the 14 states with the largest populations decide the presidency, is more than halfway to its goal of legally bypassing the Electoral College established in the Constitution.
Last week, the Maine state Senate voted in support of the plan one week after both houses of the New York legislature overwhelmingly supported it.
Now the governors of both states will need to decide whether to formally back the National Popular Vote, or NPV.
The plan is more than halfway to its goal of electing future presidents via the popular vote, after Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee, an independent, signed on last July.
The NPV campaign seeks to obtain the consent of the majority of the 538 votes in the Electoral College to award its electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote.
Now 10 jurisdictions possessing 136 electoral votes are part of the plan, just over half of the 270 electoral votes needed to bring the National Popular Vote interstate compact into effect.
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
The other GOP nominees to take one or more of those states in the last 120 years and yet lose the election:
Nixon took CA, VT and WA in 1964.
Dewey took NJ, VT, and MD in 1948.
Dewey took in VT 1944.
Willkie took VT in 1940.
Landon took VT in 1936.
Hoover took VT and DE in 1932.
Hughes took VT, DE, and IL in 1916.
The secession did work in 1861, it was orderly, the people voted on it and as a result a new nation ,the Confederate States of America, was born. The war may have been lost but the issues of states sovereignty and states rights remain.
Not a chance. Tyranny for so much of this dumbed-down culture would only be if you took away their cellphones, cable, lattes, video games, and social media.
Yeah, well someone had better be looking at how their getting there because you know this is a great breeding ground for voter fraud.
These people are evil and trying to steal our government any way they can. Their advantage is that they have so many irons in the fire it’s hard to keep up.
keep in mind that the Revolution was won by a lot less than half of the population.
Oh, hell no!
Damned straight! I wish more people "got" this.
I’m confident that if enough states sign on to this, and there is a presidential election where a Republican would win with the new system, but a Democrat would win using the system we have now, they would find a way to ignore the new method and put the Democrat in office.
Unless it's the mob I happen to be with at the time....
The National Popular Vote bill says: “Any member state may withdraw from this agreement, except that a withdrawal occurring six months or less before the end of a President’s term shall not become effective until a President or Vice President shall have been qualified to serve the next term.”
Any attempt by a state to pull out of the compact in violation of its terms would violate the Impairments Clause of the U.S. Constitution and would be void. Such an attempt would also violate existing federal law. Compliance would be enforced by Federal court action
The National Popular Vote compact is, first of all, a state law. It is a state law that would govern the manner of choosing presidential electors. A Secretary of State may not ignore or override the National Popular Vote law any more than he or she may ignore or override the winner-take-all method that is currently the law in 48 states.
There has never been a court decision allowing a state to withdraw from an interstate compact without following the procedure for withdrawal specified by the compact. Indeed, courts have consistently rebuffed the occasional (sometimes creative) attempts by states to evade their obligations under interstate compacts.
In 1976, the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland stated in Hellmuth and Associates v. Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority:
“When enacted, a compact constitutes not only law, but a contract which may not be amended, modified, or otherwise altered without the consent of all parties.”
In 1999, the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania stated in Aveline v. Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole:
“A compact takes precedence over the subsequent statutes of signatory states and, as such, a state may not unilaterally nullify, revoke, or amend one of its compacts if the compact does not so provide.”
In 1952, the U.S. Supreme Court very succinctly addressed the issue in Petty v. Tennessee-Missouri Bridge Commission:
“A compact is, after all, a contract.”
The important point is that an interstate compact is not a mere “handshake” agreement. If a state wants to rely on the goodwill and graciousness of other states to follow certain policies, it can simply enact its own state law and hope that other states decide to act in an identical manner. If a state wants a legally binding and enforceable mechanism by which it agrees to undertake certain specified actions only if other states agree to take other specified actions, it enters into an interstate compact.
Interstate compacts are supported by over two centuries of settled law guaranteeing enforceability. Interstate compacts exist because the states are sovereign. If there were no Compacts Clause in the U.S. Constitution, a state would have no way to enter into a legally binding contract with another state. The Compacts Clause, supported by the Impairments Clause, provides a way for a state to enter into a contract with other states and be assured of the enforceability of the obligations undertaken by its sister states. The enforceability of interstate compacts under the Impairments Clause is precisely the reason why sovereign states enter into interstate compacts. Without the Compacts Clause and the Impairments Clause, any contractual agreement among the states would be, in fact, no more than a handshake.
Article I-Section 10, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution specifically permits states to enter interstate compacts. There are hundreds of major compacts currently in force (and thousands of minor ones).
The current state-by-state winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes maximizes the incentive and opportunity for fraud, coercion, intimidation, confusion, and voter suppression. A very few people can change the national outcome by adding, changing, or suppressing 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 or voter suppression. One suppressed vote would be one less vote. 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.
The closest popular-vote election count over the last 130+ years of American history (in 1960), had a nationwide margin of more than 100,000 popular votes. The closest electoral-vote election in American history (in 2000) was determined by 537 votes, all in one state, when there was a lead of 537,179 (1,000 times more) popular votes nationwide.
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 system offers vote suppressors or fraudulent voters a better shot at success for a smaller effort?
A constitutional amendment could be stopped by states with as little as 3% of the U.S. population.
Exactly. Several posters were declaring that the plan to have electors vote in accordance with the national popular vote was unConstitutional. I was disagreeing with them. There is nothing ‘illegal’ about having electors vote that way - just immoral, unethical, and unfair.
Purge the mob.
It does not belong in the Union
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