National Popular Vote: Another Step Towards Dictatorship
What is NPV?
NPV wants the President to be elected by a simple majority of all American voters. The National Popular Vote movement is a radically dangerous ploy to side-step an Amendment process that would most definitely fail in favor of individual state battles with simple majority votes. It is much easier for NPV to convince a handful of states to combine or block together their electoral votes then it would be to get the nation as a whole to sign on to the idea that the President should be elected by popular vote.
How it would work.
NPV wants to get the President elected by a simple majority of all American voters by convincing enough states to agree to cast their electoral votes for the winner of the popular vote regardless of the will of the people within their state. In other words, they don’t mind if you cast a vote, they just want to be able to ignore it. Now, every state that signs onto this agreement is upsetting the influence of some of the lesser states with regard to the presidential election. There are 538 total electoral votes. The winner requires a majority or 270 votes. If they can obtain enough states to block 270 votes, they defacto determine that the winner of the popular vote will win the election. Even if they fall short of their goal of at least 270 votes. Each state that jumps on board increases the likely hood that their influence will be sufficient to guarantee the popular vote winner gets the presidency.
Sports as an analogy
Suppose The Phillies and the Yankees play in the World Series. Now the Yankees open the series with a 10-2 whooping over the Phillies. The Phillies in turn win 3 straight 1 run games and clinch the series 2-0 in game 5. In this scenario, the Yankees will have outscored the Phils by 3 runs over 5 games. They will have won the popular vote. However, the Phillies will have outright won 4 games. This is the scenario that NPV does not like. They don’t want the president to have to be elected by enough states. They want the president to be elected if every Californian and every Texan votes for him. It should not matter how big you win a particular state, not if you are interested in a presidency that represents the will of the entire country. Let’s not forget the additional impact that the illegal alien vote will have on elections. (Don’t get me started on how and why non-citizens can vote.)
So, what is so bad about electing the president by popular vote?
Like it or not, our nation is comprised of 50 separate sovereign entities called states. They created the Federal government for the purpose of maintaining peace among the states and providing a unified diplomacy abroad. The presidential position is, foremost, a diplomatic one. Its role is mainly in representing the interests of the several states. The same is true of the Senate, where they were to represent the State interests with regard to legislation and treaties. In 1913, the election of the Senate was stripped of state influence and converted to popular vote. This alienated the states from the federal government. Now in 2011, we are seeing the NPV pushing hard to remove the States’ influence on the office of the President. Remember… The title is President of “The United States”. It is not Czar. It is not Premiere. It is not Emperor. It is not Dictator. It is not Prime Minister. All of these titles indicate a man representing the nation as a whole or a national governing body. Our presidency was designed to represent the states unified when dealing with foreign powers.
What’s this College of Electors all about anyway?
The Electoral College is foremost the embodiment of “The Great Compromise” which broke the impasse of our original Constitutional Convention. There was much jealousy among the states at that time. The larger states wanted representation based on population. The smaller states wanted equal representation. They both got their way. Then again, they both gave up something. The House was organized along population. The Senate was organized on equal representation. The primary duties of each were divided. Domestic issues involving expenditures were to be mainly handled in the House with concurrency of the Senate. The foreign policy issues were handled mainly in the Senate with the President leading the negotiations with foreign powers. This why we have 538 Electoral votes. 1 vote for each house member, one vote for each Senator. The election of the president has as much or more to do with the will of the individual States as it does with the will of the People.
Why do States Matter?
The states are to act as another layer of checks and balances in a federal system. The people should be able to rely upon the states to remedy abuses of federal power. Many programs that are run from Washington, DC are unconstitutional and should be handled at the state level or abolished entirely. This is important because competition among the 50 states should act as a barometer to determine which programs are effective and how they are best implemented. Competition for citizens and businesses should be the determining factor. It is the best way to evaluate how well states are run. This migration of people also affects the national influence a given state would have upon the general government. NPV threatens to alienate states completely from the federal system and it leads the United Sates further towards pure democracy and dictatorship. In conjunction with the new War Powers being offered to the President it is a dangerous step toward the conversion of our Republic into an Empire.
Here is a quick look at what the NPV program would do to the election of the president. The 11 states in the yellow box below hold enough votes to determine the presidency. If NPV has its way, as few as 11 states out of 50 would determine the presidency.
federalexpression 
National Popular Vote has nothing to do with whether the country has a “republican” form of government or is a “democracy.”
The United States has a republican form of government regardless of whether popular votes for presidential electors are tallied at the state-level (as has been the case in 48 states) or at district-level (as has been the case in Maine and Nebraska) or at 50-state-level (as under the National Popular Vote bill).
Federalism concerns the allocation of power between state governments and the national government. The National Popular Vote bill concerns how votes are tallied, not how much power state governments possess relative to the national government. The powers of state governments are neither increased nor decreased based on whether presidential electors are selected along the state boundary lines, along district lines (as has been the case in Maine and Nebraska), or national lines. (as with the National Popular Vote).
In Gallup polls since 1944, only about 20% of the public has supported the current system of awarding all of a state’s electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each separate state (with about 70% opposed and about 10% undecided). The recent Washington Post, Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University poll shows 72% support for direct nationwide election of the President. Support is strong among Republican voters, Democratic voters, and independent voters, as well as every demographic group surveyed in virtually every state surveyed in recent polls. Support in smaller states (3 to 5 electoral votes): Alaska — 70%, DC — 76%, Delaware –75%, Idaho – 77%, Maine — 77%, Montana – 72%, Nebraska — 74%, New Hampshire –69%, Nevada — 72%, New Mexico — 76%, Oklahoma – 81%, Rhode Island — 74%, South Dakota – 71%, Utah – 70%, Vermont — 75%, and West Virginia – 81%, and Wyoming – 69%;
In the 13 lowest population states, the National Popular Vote bill already has been approved by nine state legislative chambers, including one house in, Delaware, the District of Columbia, and Maine and both houses in Hawaii, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It has been enacted by the District of Columbia, Hawaii, and Vermont.
The 11 most populous states contain 56% of the population of the United States, but under the current system, a candidate could win the Presidency by winning a mere 51% of the vote in just these 11 biggest states — that is, a mere 26% of the nation’s votes.
Most voters don’t care whether their presidential candidate wins or loses in their state . . . they care whether he/she wins the White House. Voters want to know, that even if they were on the losing side, their vote actually was directly and equally counted and mattered to their candidate. Most Americans consider the idea of the candidate with the most popular votes being declared a loser detestable. We don’t allow this in any other election in our representative republic.
oldgulph
June 21, 2011 at 1:29 am
All of this does not change the fact that the NPV system would allow my state to send electoral votes to a candidate that the population did not vote for. That is a fact. You can’t deny it.
federalexpression
June 23, 2011 at 2:56 am