Would a National Popular Vote be better?

Pat Rosenthiel, of Ainsley Shea, spoke to the Madison Forum at the Monday luncheon regarding the state-based plan for electing the president by national popular vote. Rosenthiel refreshed everyone on how the electoral college works today and describes how the National Popular Vote would work if enacted by the Georgia legislature.

As described in the book, Every Equal Vote: A State-based Plan for Electing the President by National Popular Vote

The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.The bill has been enacted by 11 jurisdictions possessing 165 electoral votes—61% of the 270 electoral votes necessary to activate it, including four small jurisdictions (RI, VT, HI, DC), three medium-size states (MD, MA, WA), and four big states (NJ, IL, NY, CA). The bill has passed a total of 33 legislative chambers in 22 states—most recently by a bipartisan 28–18 vote in the Oklahoma Senate, a 57–4 vote in New York Senate, and a 102–33 vote in NY Assembly.The shortcomings of the current system of electing the President stem from state winner-take-all statutes (i.e., state laws that award all of a state’s electoral votes to the candidate receiving the most popular votes in each separate state).Because of these state winner-take-all statutes, presidential candidates have no reason to pay attention to the issues of concern to voters in states where the statewide outcome is a foregone conclusion. As shown on the map, two-thirds of the 2012 general-election campaign events (176 of 253) were in just 4 states (Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and Iowa). Thirty eight states were ignored.

Read more at www.NationalPopularVote.com

One thought on “Would a National Popular Vote be better?”

  1. Warning: A national popular vote is a terrible idea. This explains why:
    https://publiushuldah.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/national-popular-vote-goodbye-sweet-america/
    We should think long and hard before we change the Constitution our Framers drafted at the Convention of 1787. Several of the existing amendments we allowed ourselves to be conned into supporting have been destructive.

    We should heed the words of a wise man, Daniel Webster:
    “The politician that undertakes to improve a constitution with as little thought as a farmer sets about mending his plow, is no master of his trade. If that Constitution be a systematic one, if it be a free one, its parts are so necessarily connected that an alteration in one will work an alteration in all; and this cobbler, however pure and honest his intentions, will, in the end, find that what came to his hands a fair and lovely fabric goes from them a miserable piece of patchwork.” ~Daniel Webster, 4th of July Oration 1802

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