The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC).

Every vote, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in presidential elections. Candidates would need to care about voters across the nation, not just undecided voters in a handful of swing states.

The bill would take effect only when enacted, in identical form, by states possessing a majority of the electoral votes–that is, enough electoral votes to elect a President (270 of 538). When the bill comes into effect, all the electoral votes from those states would be awarded to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC).

The bill uses the power given to each state by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution to change how they award their electoral votes for president. The National Popular Vote bill does not try to abolish the Electoral College, which would need a constitutional amendment, and could be stopped by states with as little as 3% of the U.S. population. Historically, virtually all of the major changes in the method of electing the President (for example, ending the requirement that only men who owned substantial property could vote) have come about without federal constitutional amendments, by state legislative action.

The bill has been endorsed or voted for by 1,922 state legislators (in 50 states) who have sponsored and/or cast recorded votes in favor of the bill.

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 for a national popular vote is strong in virtually every state, partisan, and demographic group surveyed in recent polls in closely divided battleground states: Colorado– 68%, Iowa –75%, Michigan– 73%, Missouri– 70%, New Hampshire– 69%, Nevada– 72%, New Mexico– 76%, North Carolina– 74%, Ohio– 70%, Pennsylvania — 78%, Virginia — 74%, and Wisconsin — 71%; in smaller states (3 to 5 electoral votes): Alaska — 70%, DC — 76%, Delaware –75%, Maine — 77%, Nebraska — 74%, New Hampshire –69%, Nevada — 72%, New Mexico — 76%, Rhode Island — 74%, and Vermont — 75%; in Southern and border states: Arkansas –80%, Kentucky — 80%, Mississippi –77%, Missouri — 70%, North Carolina — 74%, and Virginia — 74%; and in other states polled: California — 70%, Connecticut — 74% , Massachusetts — 73%, Minnesota — 75%, New York — 79%, Washington — 77%, and West Virginia- 81%.

The National Popular Vote bill has passed 30 state legislative chambers, in 20 small, medium-small, medium, and large states, including one house in Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, and Oregon, and both houses in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. The bill has been enacted by Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, and Washington. These five states possess 61 electoral votes — 23% of the 270 necessary to bring the law into effect.

See http://www.NationalPopularVote.com

Every vote, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in presidential elections. Candidates would need to care about voters across the nation, not just undecided voters in a handful of swing states.

I agree with you in general but the fact is, candidates would still spend the bulk of their time and money in the larger states and larger media markets just because of the ‘bang for the buck.’ The choice being spend the money in NY, TX, FL, or CA or spend it in AK, ND, HI or MT they’ll go with spend in NY or CA as they would reach far more voters even with the difference in ad costs (with the smaller states probably being cheaper)

74% of the public can be for something, like the Electoral College issue, and it may be a good thing. I would support it. That does not make their opinion on another issue, say, “66 percent favor term limits,” any, more democratic, discerning, or better politics.

The electoral college made sense when information traveled as fast as a horse could carry it. Now it’s a throwback, just like the United States Senate rules.

Let’s talk about this in terms of what it really is: An attempt to take electoral power away from small states. And the reason for taking that power away from the small states is that we don’t like their politics. And the reason we don’t like their politics is because we wrote them off, told them they were irrelevant, and they believed us. And why wouldn’t they?

This was all back in the ’60s and before. People with progressive or liberal attitudes sneer at the small states, especially the ‘flyover’ states, because of their seemingly backward attitudes. They write books with condescending titles like ‘What’s The Matter With Kansas?’ And they dread going to a place like Nebraska or Wyoming, unless they’re on their way to Yellowstone.

How, while it’s true we could revisit the electoral college, those people in those states will not give up their statistical advantage. And if you try to take it away from them and succeed, you will always be the enemy to them. If the agenda is to make it so Republicans can’t win by equalizing this power structure, then no Democrat will ever win Nebraska, which is bad for Nebraska.

This is good news. As it progresses however I would expect the right wing to strongly oppose it. Their strength lies in the low population states which are parochial and more conservative/libertarian than the majority of the US.

I have personally come to believe we will never have a compassionate civil society until the EC is undone.

Next, either disempower the Senate or make their representation proportional to population.

But abolishing the Electoral College will make it so that the centers of population decide who’s in the highest office in the land!

AND THAT IS JUST TERRIBLE.

That would seem to imply that the minimum number of states needed in order for this legislation to go into effect is seven: CA (55), TX (34), NY (31), FL (27), PA (21), OH (20), and any one of MI (17), NC (15), VA (13), GA (15), MA (12), or MO (11).

All of what you say is true. But it’s not democracy. I would hope someday there is a politician or party willing to pose the question. Do we want a democracy or do we small numbers of parochial largely conservative people having more power than the majority of the nation.

In Presidential elections and should we go on to elect justices to SCOTUS, the “power of the states” is meaningless. What difference does it make who the majority of Texans vote for or who the majority of people in Rhode Island vote for if all of those votes are pooled anyway? Tribalism and bragging rights? Because the President of the United States will still represent all 50 states. It doesn’t matter if Nebraska voters never again vote for a Democratic President, unless you’re keeping score and giving out prizes.

Well, there’s also the problem that the Electoral College is undemocratic, and a relic, and it’s not inherently good to give small states more power in deciding who’s President in order to make them feel better about the Democrats.

I mean, I’m sorry, but tough shit. Masking the Democratic majority in this country isn’t a noble goal.

Oh good, I have not bashed Mark Penn for months. Where do we start with the second most corrupt Democrat, after Rahm? Here is one. Penn’s propaganda company, Burson-Marsteller worked with Blackwater.

Blackwater Worldwide, its reputation in tatters and its lucrative government contracts in jeopardy, is mounting an aggressive legal, political and public relations counterstrike.

It has hired a bipartisan stable of big-name Washington lawyers, lobbyists and press advisers, including the public relations powerhouse Burson-Marsteller, which was brought in briefly, but at a critical moment, to help Blackwater’s chairman, Erik D. Prince, prepare for his first Congressional hearing…

Mark J. Penn, Burson-Marsteller’s chairman and a senior adviser to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign, said in an e-mail message that he had no direct contact with Blackwater and that the work was landed by BKSH, a subsidiary. BKSH is a political consulting firm led by Charles R. Black Jr., an adviser to President Bush and his father, and R. Scott Pastrick, a top Democratic fund-raiser. Mr. Penn said that a BKSH associate had worked briefly in Iraq and met several Blackwater personnel, who steered the work to his firm.

You will find some who disagree. In addition to common experience there are studies (I just read one) that show people who live in large towns and cities are better adjusted socially and more accepting of others rights and diversity.

I know that when I think about how we should elect the President, I immediately remember how my proud ideological Communist forefathers in the 1960s established the party line about flyover country, and how much I loathe and fear the state that I live in, and various other things that Rush Limbaugh tells me are true.

Are you kidding? Have you been to a city? There are NON WHITE PEOPLE ALL OVER THE PLACE. Do you want those people to have their proportional say in national offices?

LOL — You got me!

I understand the sentiment, but I don’t think this way is the right way to go about it because it retains the “winner-takes-all” mentality. That, above all else, is the greatest flaw in our entire electoral process.

I think that the better solution is the “proportional” college. If you win X% of a state’s popular vote, you win X% of that State’s EC votes.

Every state still matters, and every vote still matters, even for the Democratic voters in a heavy Republican state.

The electoral college is an undemocratic throwback to a different time. Take the Senate for example: Texas has 24,782,302 people and two votes in the Senate and Wyoming has 544,270 people and two votes in the Senate. How is that fair? It’s possible by the rules of the Senate for Senators representing less than 20 percent of the total population to thwart the will of the other 80 percent. I view the college in the same light. We don’t need it, it gives unfair advantage to small numbers of people and even enables the election of the candidate that doesn’t win the popular vote. It’s a dinosaur. Time for it to go extinct.

Under the current system of electing the President, political clout comes from being a closely divided battleground state, not the electoral college two-vote bonus.

12 of the 13 smallest states (3-4 electoral votes) are almost invariably non-competitive, and ignored, in presidential elections. Six regularly vote Republican (Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, and South Dakota),, and six regularly vote Democratic (Rhode Island, Delaware, Hawaii, Vermont, Maine, and DC) in presidential elections. So despite the fact that these 12 states together possess 40 electoral votes, because they are not closely divided battleground states, none of these 12 states get visits, advertising or polling or policy considerations by presidential candidates.

The concept of a national popular vote for President is far from being politically “radioactive” in small states, because the small states recognize they are the most disadvantaged group of states under the current presidential election system.

The National Popular Vote bill has been approved by eight state legislative chambers in the 13 smallest states, including one house in Delaware and Maine and both houses in Hawaii, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It has been enacted by Hawaii.

Most of the medium-small states (with five or six electoral votes) are similarly non-competitive in presidential elections (and therefore similarly disadvantaged). In fact, of the 22 medium-smallest states (those with three, four, five, or six electoral votes), only New Hampshire (with four electoral votes), New Mexico (five electoral votes), and Nevada (five electoral votes) have been battleground states in recent elections.

Because so few of the 22 small and medium-small states are closely divided battleground states in presidential elections, the current system actually shifts power from voters in the small and medium-small states to voters in a handful of big states. The New York Times reported early in 2008 (May 11, 2008) that both major political parties were already in agreement that there would be at most 14 battleground states in 2008 (involving only 166 of the 538 electoral votes). In other words, three-quarters of the states were ignored under the current system in the 2008 election. Michigan (17 electoral votes), Ohio (20), Pennsylvania (21), and Florida (27) contain over half of the electoral votes that mattered in 2008 (85 of the 166 electoral votes). There were only three battleground states among the 22 small and medium-small states (i.e., New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Nevada). These three states contain only 14 of the 166 electoral votes. Anyone concerned about the relative power of big states and small states should realize that the current system shifts power from voters in the small and medium-small states to voters in a handful of big states.

The main media at the moment, namely TV, costs much more per impression in big cities than in smaller towns and rural area. So, if you just looked at TV, candidates get more bang for the buck in smaller towns and rural areas.

As an example, when all the votes are equal, in California state-wide elections, candidates for governor or U.S. Senate don’t campaign just in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and those places don’t control the outcome (otherwise California wouldn’t have recently had Republican governors Reagan, Dukemejian, Wilson, and Schwarzenegger). A vote in rural Alpine county is just an important as a vote in Los Angeles.

If the National Popular Vote bill were to become law, it would not change the need for candidates to build a winning coalition across demographics. Any candidate who yielded, for example, the 21% of Americans who live in rural areas in favor of a “big city” approach would not likely win the national popular vote. Candidates would still have to appeal to a broad range of demographics, and perhaps even more so, because the election wouldn’t be capable of coming down to just one demographic, such as voters in Ohio.

I don’t agree. As a reliable vote for the left in Texas, my vote never counts in presidential races, due to the winner take all system, (the electoral college), but if my Democratic vote was pooled with Democratic votes in Hawaii and Massachusetts, it would go into the total votes cast for that candidate. I fail to see how a modified college would make that better.

A system in which electoral votes are divided proportionally by state would not accurately reflect the nationwide popular vote and would not make every vote equal.

Every vote would not be equal under the proportional approach. The proportional approach would perpetuate the inequality of votes among states due to each state’s bonus of two electoral votes. It would penalize states, such as Montana, that have only one U.S. Representative even though it has almost three times more population than other small states with one congressman. It would penalize fast-growing states that do not receive any increase in their number of electoral votes until after the next federal census. It would penalize states with high voter turnout (e.g., Utah, Oregon).

Moreover, the fractional proportional allocation approach does not assure election of the winner of the nationwide popular vote. In 2000, for example, it would have resulted in the election of the second-place candidate.

The Electoral College should certainly go, but our biggest problem is the Senate. Talk about undemocratic.

Yep, I’ve pointed that out.

My bad. You said Senate rules, so I assumed you were talking about procedural issues within the Senate (filibuster, etc.).

I am all for getting rid of the EC and going to the popular vote. That said, none of it will matter unless we also get rid of electronic voting machines and return to paper ballots.

What we’re all dancing around is that an electoral college used to be a useful, even necessary thing when information could only travel at the speed of horse. The same can be said for our whole Democratic Republic system of government but I’m not advocating for really radical changes in the way we govern ourselves in this thread. Elimination of the electoral college, elimination of paid lobbying and public financing of elections, whomever qualifies for the ballot without exception, will go a long way. After that we can discuss the Senate. We are all sitting here in very diverse locations, discussing this issue in real time. If that doesn’t illustrate the obsolescence of the electoral college, I can’t do any better.

Look, both systems have flaws. I live in Nevada. Under your plan, how many Democratic voters here are going to turn out and vote for President under this system?

How’s that going to affect down-ticket races for Congress and the State Legislature?

How will that impact the ability for state issues to get national attention if we’re no more valuable to a Presidential Candidate than a large city in New York or Florida?

See my comment @ 18 too. :)

I think MORE people will turn out! Don’t you think that people are more likely to vote when they know their vote will go into a national bucket for their candidate, rather than being discarded because the other party will inevitably carry that state? I don’t get the logic.

One thing to remember – this plan is no more inconsistent with the original design of the Constitution that what we have now.

The original plan was for states to select electors however they chose – popular election, legislative selection – it was left entirely to each state. Those people were supposed to be unpledged, and they would meet and deliberate and make a choice.

That system worked once or twice, and what we have had since then is an entirely different and inconsistent system built up on that earlier apparatus.

If someone tells you that this change undoes the Founders design, they simply are off by over two hundred years.

You don’t live in a state that’s evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, with nonpartisans and independents being the “wild card”.

What difference does that make? Also, Texas isn’t nearly as red as people make it out to be. As a Progressive in Texas, I’d be much more inclined to vote if my vote for a Democratic candidate counted the same as a vote for the same candidate in Massachusetts. As it is for the last few cycles, I could have just as well stayed home for all the good my vote has done. I’m still only seeing your logic if you’re keeping score.

I, for one, would feel personally empowered if my vote counted as one vote, as it should, and as many Americans believed it did until 2000. And I’m speaking as a Democratic resident of a state whose electoral votes were all delivered to “my candidate” due to our absolute wreck of a system. My point of view would have been far more accurately represented if my vote had gone into the pool of Americans who agreed with me, rather than helping edge out the people who disagreed with me within my state – a now-arbitrary border when it comes to the President of the entire United States.

Thank you. The Founders’ system was basically a recipe for what they got: a twice-a-decade Congressional squabble where the legislature chose the President through horse-trading. And when we decided that checks and balances were a better Madisonian philosophy, we changed the system in the leeway wisely given us by the document.

It’s why original meaning is just as ridiculous a position as original intent in interpreting the Constitution. We made up the Presidential election system as we went along, and we’re still doing it, and it’s time for an update.

I, for one, would feel personally empowered if my vote counted as one vote, as it should

Me too! Absolutely! Though I’ve always known about the electoral college, having paid attention in government class. And since my opinion on this is subjective, I don’t get the rationale behind someone trying to convince me that I shouldn’t feel that way. I think now would be a good time to point out that without the electoral college system, W would have never been President.

I do live in such a state, and I support national popular vote for President. In general, with few exceptions, I’m not interested in anti-democratic solutions to electoral problems in the United States.

One thing worth noting too: while there’s nonstop contentious and sometimes angry debate among statisticians all over the world as to what’s the best way to represent opinion in a national race, if you gathered them all together in a conference and suggested the American Electoral College as an option, you’d be jeered out of the room unanimously. It’d be the only way you’d get them to agree on anything.

President Obama won by 8 million votes. So that means that every single voter could have stayed home in Nevada and it would have made almost no difference in the outcome. When you look and see that the overwhelming majority of votes in Nevada come out of Las Vegas, it does have an impact.

3,000 people in Elko County voting for Obama doesn’t amount to beans (He won Nevada’s popular vote by 120,000). But 3,000 votes could make the difference in a State Assembly race that shifts the balance of power there.

It’s already hard to get turnout in the rurals because our votes are effectively neutralized by the outcome in Las Vegas (see Reid, Harry). This would make it much more difficult.

Aren’t you making a bit of a leap between “every voter could have stayed home in Nevada” and “voters would have stayed home” when it comes to Obama’s election? Are you contending that 2008 would have had more depressed turnout if people knew their vote for or against Obama (and that’s what that race was, and the thing that increased turnout down the ticket nationwide) would go to a national tally rather than to a now-well-known, still-poorly-understood convoluted mess where their vote might disappear into the historic ether?

It doesn’t sound reflective of anything I know about voting behavior. Then again, I am in favor of Condorcet-Borda two method voting so I know I’m beyond the American pale. (No one be afraid of those terms, either, they’re not hard ones and the Wikipedia articles on them are surprisingly top-notch.)

We are also dealing with a question of social justice here, we have to remember, for which I believe Democrats have occasionally expressed a passing support, here and there.

The way I see it, we’re pretty on the ball with voting tech in this country when it comes to the machines nowadays, thanks to 2000 and, to a lesser extent, 2004 and certain state races in 2006 and 2008. Even if that’s pencil and paper instead of touch-screens, or paper trails, or whatever, we are really concerned as a people, and the experts and politicians are really concerned too, that we have the technology that best fits the reality of voting, here, now, in the next election.

But voting technology is also method, and the method we have right now for electing a President is the true, real version of that scare story Newt Gingrich likes to tell about how if there had been a Candlemakers’ Union, the light bulb would have been banned. Except, of course, unlike unions, existing party structures actually have the power to stack the deck, and they all benefit from an unchanged system by default. There are exceptions, but it’s for the same reason that incumbent reelection is in both parties’ interests. If you don’t have to change, you don’t have to spend the money and time and effort to change, and also the bigwigs you’ve latched onto won’t be challenged by newly empowered constituencies, and so you yourself, the party hack, stays put. Daniel Dennett notes how easily it is to confuse keeping yourself in power (since you think you’re right) with promoting the ideals and ideas you profess.

The truth is that the Electoral College (and let’s be honest, a lot of aspects of our upper house) is technology designed for slave plantations, silversmiths, and sailing ships full of tea. It’s like if we pretended the interstate commerce clause in the Constitution required us to use horses and buggies instead of automobiles.

That’s how it’s viewed internationally, I can tell you that. It’s a fucking joke abroad since 2000, how while they may have runoffs and contests that turn simultaneously contentious and boring as they seek an outcome people will accept for highest office, we in America have a creaky embarrassing Rube Goldberg machine that only remains in place because it sort of, kind of, thanks to fiddling and diddling, comes close to matching the national popular vote that we actually care about. And then it doesn’t and we all freak out and look like some banana republic.

If we’re looking for “good things” to do, I’d prefer term limits on Congressmen and Senators over the abolition of the Electoral College. While I do feel that it is an outmoded form of election, I think this would lead the call to question why we have two Senators from each state and so on and so forth.

It would be nice to have, the abolition of the Electoral College, Term Limits of Congress and forced public financing of elections. After all, they are our airwaves. Why we have to pay the companies that pay us for the right to use the airwaves for an intrinsic function is stupid.

Why stop with junking the Electoral College? We ought to junk the states, too.

The idea of semi-sovereign states may have made sense when the federalists were trying to create a country out of what were independent colonies but it just gets in the way now. We ought get rid of the idea. If we had to, we could retain the names for some sort of administrative regions but as far as letting them have any real power, that day has past. They’ve proven themselves to be too easily corrupted by special interests and have become a breeding ground for bad ideas. My own Missouri General Assembly, for instance, is a swamp teeming with vermin and pestilence. I’d like to see it drained.

Along with this change, there would need to be another change I’ve been advocating for awhile. For Presidential elections, polls must be open for a 24 hour period opening and closing at the same time across the nation. IOW, polls might open at 7 am in New York, 6 am in Chicago, 5 am in Denver, 4 am in Los Angeles, etc.

Thus turnout will not be depressed in the western most states, everyone will have an opportunity to vote, and less time for Luke Russert to play with his father’s white board.

I only have 2 points to make. The first is this: are the people polled here the same people who only last week demonstrated that 25 to 30% didn’t know the Revolutionary War involved England? If we are going to mess with the Constitution, I think the context in which it was written is important. And I think there is sad evidence out there that the context will be overlooked. I think the argument about big states-small states is a valid concern, but I am more concerned about raising the level of understanding in the populace. Direct popular voting is a satisfying concept in many respects, but a scary one too. It might be why we have an electoral college.

The other point goes to a remark above about major-market campaign spending–that it will always be NY-CA- and a few other states will get the lion’s share of campaign spending because they are media-hubs/celebrity hubs and some would argue demographic/diversity hubs. If this premise were true, then why don’t the parties just come out an admit it, and appeal for national cash all the time and ignore the local campaigns? The national matters get settled in some tournament venues. I think it is pretty obvious when you put it that way, it becomes inherently repulsive to most of the people. Even with the internet, directing voting for a You Tube candidate would be a scary proposition, and this is the logical extreme of the hub-argument.

I am all for calling attention to the context in which the electoral college was created – I did so above. As I said, our system bears no resemblance to the electoral college as it was originally conceived. So you cannot defend it on that basis. This actually undermines your argument.

Beyond that, you implicitly argue that the masses are fools while elites are not. Considering that elites believe that war can reduce terrorism, that cuts to Social Security can address the deficit while taxes and cutting defense spending cannot, and that government spending cannot create jobs, I would say there is plenty of evidence that it is elites that are unfit to rule. They might do better on trivia, but they often do far worse on many things that matter.

That’s the next step.

Well about that many were for the public option too…seems like we’re not being listened to. I wonder why?

I for one would like to see California treated as something other than an ugly progressive stepchild with a piggy bank. The only time we hear from national candidates is for fundraisers, then anything we want is written off as fringe-left or “San Francisco values”.