National Popular Vote

As noted by one of the driving forces behind the proposed law, the National Popular Vote Inc., Massachusetts and New York made significant strides on behalf of the law this year. Late this summer, Gov. Deval Patrick signed a National Popular Vote bill into law, making the state the sixth to enact the law and giving the National Popular Vote movement 27 percent of the electoral votes needed to make it the law of the land. (The National Popular Vote would become effective if states holding a majority of electoral votes, 270, enact it.)Upon signing the bill, Gov. Patrick said, "Voter participation in all 50 states is critical to the strength of our democracy and the national popular voter movement will bring more voters into the fold and ensure that every vote counts."

New York state lawmakers also made major progress toward enacting the provision. The New York Senate overwhelmingly passed the National Popular Vote bill, which is now pending in the 150-member New York Assembly, where the bill has 80 sponsors. The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg said the state senate's action revealed that lawmakers' "interests coincide not only with those of all their constituents, regardless of party, but also with an elementary tenet of democracy: that elections should be decided by counting up the votes of citizens, with every individual vote being of equal vote."

The New York Times also got behind the National Vote bill, saying in an editorial that the "Electoral College was established by the nation's founders in part to appease slave-owning states. It is based indirectly on population, and slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person. Each state now gets as many electoral votes as it has representatives in Congress. The results can be what we all saw in 2000, where the votes of one state, Florida, decided the election despite the fact that Mr. Gore was the nation's choice by more than a half-million votes."

In addition, earlier this month the District of Columbia Mayor Adrian Fenty signed the National Popular Vote bill. In reporting on Fenty's action, Reuters cited recent polling that "points to overwhelming majorities of voters" in Idaho, Nebraska, South Dakota, Kentucky and several other states "favor the National Vote plan over current winner-take-all rules (i.e. awarding all of a state's electoral votes to the candidate who receives the most popular voters in each state)."

The New York Times editorial board today urged the New York Assembly to follow the state Senate's lead and adopt the National Popular Vote law, saying the legislature "has a chance to withdraw from the archaic and unfair way this country picks its chief executives."

The Times editorial continues:

The Electoral College was established by the nation's founders in part to appease slave-owning states. It is based indirectly on population, and slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person. Each state now gets as many electoral votes as it has representatives in Congress. New York, for example, has 31 electoral votes, and whoever wins the most votes in New York gets all 31.

The results can be what we all saw in 2000, where the votes of one state, Florida, decided the election despite the fact that Mr. Gore was the nation's choice by more than a half-million votes.

The editorial also notes the work of the organization called National Popular Vote. The nonprofit group educates the public about its proposal to "implement a nationwide popular election of the President of the United States.

The Times editorial noted that since the 2000 presidential debacle that the National Popular Vote organization has advocated proposals that New York lawmakers are moving closer to approving.

Since it takes 270 electoral votes to win the presidency, the National Popular Vote laws would go into effect only if states accounting for 270 or more electoral votes agree to the new system. So far, five states, with a total of 61 electoral votes, have done that. New York should become the sixth. [Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland and Washington have adopted National Popular Vote laws.]

In a recent op-ed for the Albany Times Union, John R. Koza, chairman of the National Popular Vote, maintained, "It's time to reform the system and do what poll results show 78 percent of New Yorkers have long supported - elect the president by a national popular vote."