SUMMARY:
We believe that the Electoral College is essential to our federalist republic and must be retained.
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The founders of the federal Constitution exercised great care to ensure a balance in power among the states in determining the office of President of the United States. This distribution of power among the states is an important aspect of our federalist Union. A popular vote of the people, generally, would negate this important characteristic, leading to a nationalist (centralized power) system of government at the federal level.
The Electoral College is comprised of electors from each state who are nominated by the various political parties and elected by the citizens. Part of reason for this mode of process was because it was believed by the founders that an elector would be more knowledgeable than the average citizen and could better preserve the integrity of government.
In our system of government, the collective opinion of the individual state populations is considered more important than the opinion of the national population taken as a whole. The framers recognized that in order to prevent larger states from dominating national elections, a system was needed to provide a voice to those living in less populated ones. This is the careful and well thought out design of the Electoral College. It obliges presidential candidates to campaign for popular support in states across the country rather than simply relying on larger urban areas. Requiring wide spread support unifies the nation as a whole as opposed to relying solely on highly populated areas which would undermine our cohesiveness as a nation.
The Electoral College in one example evidenced in the federal Constitution that demonstrates state sovereignty, and it must be retained. We strongly oppose any attempt to abolish it. For more information on the Electoral College process, see the following website.
http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/about.html
2 Responses to Electoral College vs The Popular Vote.
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The current system of electing the president ensures that the candidates, after the primaries, do not reach out to all of the states and their voters. Candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, campaign, or care about the voter concerns in the dozens of states where they are safely ahead or hopelessly behind. The reason for this is the state-by-state winner-take-all method (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but since enacted by 48 states), under which all of a state’s electoral votes are awarded to the candidate who gets the most votes in each separate state.
Presidential candidates concentrate their attention on only a handful of closely divided “battleground” states and their voters. In the 2012 election, pundits and campaign operatives agree already, that, at most, only 14 states and their voters will matter. None of the 10 most rural states will matter, as usual. Almost 75% of the country will be ignored –including 19 of the 22 lowest population and medium-small states, and 17 medium and big states like CA, GA, NY, and TX. This will be more obscene than the 2008 campaign,when candidates concentrated over 2/3rds of their campaign events and ad money in just 6 states, and 98% in just 15 states (CO, FL, IN, IA, MI, MN, MO, NV, NH, NM, NC, OH, PA, VA, and WI). Over half (57%) of the events were in just 4 states (OH, FL, PA, and VA). In 2004, candidates concentrated over 2/3rds of their money and campaign visits in 5 states; over 80% in 9 states; and over 99% of their money in 16 states.
2/3rds of the states and people have been merely spectators to the presidential elections.
Policies important to the citizens of ‘flyover’ states are not as highly prioritized as policies important to ‘battleground’ states when it comes to governing.
The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC).
The National Popular Vote bill is a state-based approach. It preserves the Electoral College and state control of elections. It changes the way electoral votes are awarded in the Electoral College. It assures that every vote is equal and that every voter will matter in every state in every presidential election, as in virtually every other election in the country.
Under National Popular Vote, every vote, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in presidential elections, and included in the national count that determines the candidate with the most popular votes, who then is guaranteed the majority of electoral votes needed to win the presidency. It gives a voice to the minority party voters in each state. Now their votes are counted only for the candidate they did not vote for. Every vote, everywhere would be counted for and directly assist the candidate for whom it was cast. Candidates would need to care about voters across the nation, not just undecided voters in a handful of swing states.
The Electoral College that we have today was not designed, anticipated, or favored by the Founding Fathers but, instead, is the product of decades of evolutionary change precipitated by the emergence of political parties and enactment by 48 states of winner-take-all laws, not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution.
States have the responsibility to make their voters relevant in every presidential election. 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. It does not abolish the Electoral College.
Unable to agree on any particular method, the Founding Fathers left the choice of method for selecting presidential electors exclusively to the states by adopting the language contained in section 1 of Article II of the U.S. Constitution– “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors . . .” The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly characterized the authority of the state legislatures over the manner of awarding their electoral votes as “plenary” and “exclusive.”
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).