Ignoring Constituents

Posted by Larry Miller on July 22, 2010 under Why | 2 Comments to Read

There is a movement afoot that has kept pretty much under the radar, that will take us one more step toward establishing national government supremacy over the free and sovereign states. It is called the National Popular Vote movement. Up to this point, such conservative bastions as Massachusetts, Illinois, New Jersey, Hawaii, Washington and the Peoples Republic of Maryland have approved the cockamamie plan to ignore the voters of their state and instruct their electors to cast their votes for the winner of the national popular vote.

I will have to admit that there are some aspects of this that does seem to be appealing. Who could be opposed to the President being selected by the majority of voters? This is the way it is meant to be. However, when you consider that nine or ten states could make the voters in the rest of the country irrelevant, it doesn’t seem to be such a good idea. What follows from this is that there would be even less incentive for national candidates to deign to visit the smaller, less populous states.

Polling tells us roughly 70% of the American people would be in favor of simply going by the total votes for each candidate. I have no doubt that the numbers support this. What I wonder is if these good people would be so agreeable if the question were asked how they felt about representatives from their state casting votes contrary to the majority of their neighbors. As with any poll, the way you phrase a question has a great influence on the results.

The goal of this movement is to have states with sufficient votes, 270, to win in the electoral college agree to cast their ballots for the candidate with the most popular votes… then no matter what the rest of the country wants or the constitution demands, is beside the point. Again, the smaller states, or those wishing to honor the will of their people, would be effectively neutered.

The beauty of our electoral system is that, despite the apparent unfairness and potential for an election like we had in 2000 that drove Algore supporters to distraction, is that our founders were concerned that voters of every state would have their voices heard. Now, as with so much going on in our political world, expediency and desired results are taking the place of faithfulness to the process that has served us well for so many years.

Some may wonder whether sparing the feelings of the folks in East Overshoe, SD is worth the danger that of electing a President who did not represent a majority of the people. It should be be noted that Bill Clinton was a 42% president. For those who believe there may be such a thing as ACORN inspired voter fraud, the segmentation of vote counting by state builds a firewall around each area where this may occur. Instead of polluting the entire voting pool, these nefarious deeds would be confined to an individual state.

While this is bad enough, it would be far worse to have the excess votes dilute the will of everyone else in the country. On the other hand, nationalizing the process would reduce the influence of unions on industrial (or formerly industrial) states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. However, would we take that approach… that of looking for a particular outcome rather than supporting the integrity of the process, we would be like progressives who value results over purity of process. This cannot be if our country, as we know it, is to survive and prosper.

Whether electing our President as a national event or one retaining our current practice of actually have an election in each state for people to represent the will of that state is a good idea or not, those promoting the idea obviously do not respect the constitution. As with so many of the actions of the current administration, they are attempting to do an end run around the document. If the electoral process is to be changed from the constitutionally sanctioned one, creating a new amendment would be the way to do it as it would assure more wide spread support than we get from the actions of several renegade states.

This is a legitimate debate. However, we cannot accept the idea of several state legislatures taking it upon themselves to make a change such as this without the appropriate discussion and without following due process. Let the debate begin… just don’t let the, hopefully, well meaning people slip this through without letting the world know what they are up to.