A Growing Effort To Bypass The Electoral College

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A growing effort to bypass the Electoral College

July 19, 2010 10:40 AM

By Martin Finucane, Globe Staff

The state Legislature is poised to give final approval this week to a new law intended to bypass the Electoral College system and ensure that the winner of the presidential election is determined by the national popular vote.

Both the House and Senate have approved the National Popular Vote bill. Final enactment votes are needed in both chambers, however, before the bill goes to the governor's desk, the Globe reported last week.

• Poll: Do you think the Electoral College system should stay?

Governor Deval Patrick's press office didn't immediately return a message this morning seeking comment on whether he would sign the bill, if it makes its way to his desk. Under the proposed law, all 12 of the state's electoral votes would be awarded to the candidate who receives the most votes nationally.

Supporters are waging a state-by-state campaign to try to get such bills enacted. Once states possessing a majority of the electoral votes (or 270 of 538 have enacted the laws, the candidate winning the most votes nationally would be assured a majority of the Electoral College votes, no matter how the other states vote and how their electoral votes are distributed.

Illinois, New Jersey, Hawaii, Maryland, and Washington have already adopted the legislation, according to the National Popular Vote campaign's website.

Supporters of the change say that the current Electoral College system is confusing and causes candidates to focus unduly on a handful of battleground states.

Critics say the current system is not broken. They also point to the disturbing scenario that Candidate X wins nationally, but Candidate Y has won in Massachusetts. In that case, all of the state's 12 electoral votes would go to Candidate X, the candidate who was not supported by Massachusetts voters.

The measure passed both branches of the Legislature in 2008 but did not make it all the way through the process.

[Ryan Ruck]

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Saw this earlier today on Fox and had thought it would be important to post.

This is such a flagrant attempt to undermine the our system of government. You mind if I split this off into its own thread in the Progressive Tyranny forum?

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Please put this where it needs to go.

[Ryan Ruck]

Sorry it took a minute to get back to this. Was keeping an eye on the sky with some severe weather blowing through. Rotating storm that could have dropped a tornado just blew right through my town! Lots of heavy rain and heavy wind changing direction! Fortunately it eased up and has moved through.

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Guess what part of the Constitution goes next!

Drastic change in works to revamp whole Electoral College

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Posted: July 24, 2010
11:05 pm Eastern

© 2010 WorldNetDaily

Democrats have found yet another way to circumvent the U.S. Constitution: Bypass the Electoral College and elect a president by popular vote without first passing an amendment to the founding document, Jerome Corsi's Red Alert reports.

The Massachusetts Senate has joined five other states in passing a National Popular Vote bill to do just that. It approved the legislation July 15 by a margin of 28-10.

National Popular Vote website displays this map showing legislation's advance in various states.

The National Popular Vote, which already passed the Massachusetts House, is within one final "enactment vote" in the Massachusetts Senate before the measure can be ready for the governor's signature, the Boston Globe reported.

"Under the proposed law, all 12 of the state's electoral votes would be awarded to the candidate who receives the most votes nationally," according to the report.

"The idea is that Massachusetts will instruct its electors in the Electoral College to vote for the candidate receiving the majority of presidential election votes nationally, regardless of how the state's own voters cast their ballots," Corsi explained.

The Massachusetts National Popular Vote bill, if signed into law by Gov. Deval Patrick, will not go into effect until states possessing a majority of Electoral College votes pass similar legislation.

The movement is popularly characterized as "One Person, One Vote for President," a slogan designed to suggest the Electoral College method of counting presidential votes is "unfair" under a 14th Amendment "One Vote, One Person" definition of voter rights.

Critics fear the movement, if successful, could turn the entire nation into a potential "Florida 2000" battleground in close elections.

"Even in states where a candidate lost by a huge margin, every vote would need to be examined, a catastrophic, costly scenario," John Cork wrote in The New York Times.

"It would become possible, in a three-party race, for a candidate to fail to win even a single state but take the popular vote," he continued. "Do we really want to create a system where New York electoral votes could be determined by voters in Utah or Alaska?"

Corsi argues that a national movement to pass National Popular Vote legislation in the state legislatures has been motivated by Democrats who remain fixated on the idea that George W. Bush "stole" the 2000 presidential election, supposedly by relying on a Supreme Court decision to get Florida's electoral votes. They say the decision denied Al Gore the presidency, even though Gore got the majority of popular votes cast throughout the United States.

Once enough states possessing a majority of the electoral votes (270 of the 538 electors nationally) have enacted similar laws, the presidential candidate winning the most votes nationally would be assured a majority of the Electoral College votes, regardless of how other states vote or how their electors are distributed.

Illinois, New Jersey, Hawaii, Maryland and Washington have already adopted national-popular-vote bills.

These states add up to 61 electoral votes, 23 percent of the 270 electoral votes needed to activate the legislation: Illinois, 20 electoral votes; New Jersey, 15 votes; Hawaii, 4 votes; Maryland, 10 votes; and Washington state, 11 votes.

The bill has passed 30 legislative chambers in 20 states, Corsi wrote. The National Popular Vote movement is already one-fourth of the way to accomplishing its goal.

"If the National Public Vote movement succeeds," he added, "the president might be chosen by the popular-vote winner in 10 or 11 of the most populous states."

For more information on the widespread support for the movement, read Jerome Corsi's Red Alert, the premium, online intelligence news source by the WND staff writer, columnist and author of the New York Times No. 1 best-seller, "The Obama Nation."

Red Alert's author, who received a doctorate from Harvard in political science in 1972, is the author of the No. 1 New York Times best-sellers "The Obama Nation" and (with co-author John E. O'Neill) "Unfit for Command." He is also the author of several other books, including "America for Sale," "The Late Great U.S.A." and "Why Israel Can't Wait." In addition to serving as a senior staff reporter for WorldNetDaily, Corsi is a senior managing director in the financial-services group at Gilford Securities.

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Mass. Legislature approves plan to bypass Electoral College

By Martin Finucane, Globe Staff

The Massachusetts Legislature has approved a new law intended to bypass the Electoral College system and ensure that the winner of the presidential election is determined by the national popular vote.

"What we are submitting is the idea that the president should be selected by the majority of people in the United States of America," Senator James B. Eldridge, an Acton Democrat, said before the Senate voted to enact the bill.

Under the new bill, he said, "Every vote will be of the same weight across the country."

But Senate minority leader Richard Tisei said the state was meddling with a system that was "tried and true" since the founding of the country.

"We've had a lot of bad ideas come through this chamber over the years, but this is going to be one of the worst ideas that has surfaced and actually garnered some support," said Tisei, who is also the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor.

The bill, which passed on a 28-to-9 vote, now heads to Democratic Governor Deval Patrick's desk. The governor has said in the past that he supports the bill, said his spokeswoman Kim Haberlin.

Under the law, which was enacted by the House last week, all 12 of the state's electoral votes would be awarded to the candidate who receives the most votes nationally.

Supporters are campaigning, state by state, to get such bills enacted. Once states accounting for a majority of the electoral votes (or 270 of 538) have enacted the laws, the candidate winning the most votes nationally would be assured a majority of Electoral College votes. That would hold true no matter how the other states vote and how their electoral votes are distributed.

Illinois, New Jersey, Hawaii, Maryland, and Washington have already approved the legislation, according to the National Popular Vote campaign's website. The new system would only go into effect once a sufficient number of states have passed laws that would make it work.

The current Electoral College system is confusing and causes presidential candidates to focus unduly on a handful of battleground states, supporters say. They also say that the popular vote winner has lost in four of the nation's 56 elections.

Presidential candidates now "ignore wide swaths of the country" they consider strong blue or red states and focus their campaigning on contested states, Eldridge said. If the president were picked by national popular vote, he argued, candidates would spread their attention out more evenly.

"That's really what we're talking about is making sure that every voter, no matter where they live, that they're being reached out to," he said.

Opponents say the current system works. They are concerned about a possible scenario where Candidate X wins nationally, but Candidate Y has won in Massachusetts. In that case, all of the state's 12 electoral votes would go to Candidate X, the candidate who was not supported by Massachusetts voters.

Tisei also criticized the proponents for not following the normal procedures to seek a constitutional amendment.

"The thing about this that bothers me the most is it's so sneaky. This is the way that liberals do things a lot of times, very sneaky," he said. "This is sort of an end run around the Constitution."

The measure passed both branches of the Legislature in 2008 but did not make it all the way through the process.