Efforts Again Being Made To Go Around Electoral College

By Chad Groening, OneNewsNow: An author and political analyst reports an effort is afoot by well-funded liberal activists to effectively get rid of the Electoral College in its present form, without having to use the constitutional amendment process.

A group called National Popular Vote (NPV) is pushing state legislatures to enter into a compact that calls for them to allocate their electoral votes in a particular presidential election to the candidate who gets the most votes nationwide rather than to the contender who gets the most votes in their state. NPV argues that the legislation "would reform the Electoral College so that the electoral vote reflects the choice of the nation's voters" for president.

However, Tara Ross, author of Enlightened Democracy: The Case for the Electoral College, cautions that under such a plan, the 11 largest states -- with a total of 271 electoral votes -- could band together and elect the president.

"If you got those 11 biggest states to all agree to do that, you would be switching to a direct election system," she explains. "By contrast, if you were to try to formally get rid of the Electoral College through a constitutional amendment, that would take 38 states, which is a much higher hurdle to climb and one they think they can't climb, which is why they're trying to do it through this kind of end-run around the constitutional process."

Ross has a suggestion as to why the NPV is pushing for this change. "What I think they must think is that they have strength in the urban areas and in the heavily populated areas," she suspects. "So therefore, if you switch to an individual election, then they can just go focus on those people and rack up votes there, and it will end up helping their cause."

The political analyst notes that five states have already joined the compact -- Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, and Washington (a total of 61 electoral votes). Five more states (California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont) could join in the near future.

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Bill Smith, Editor, ARRA News Service: Arkansas dallied with this proposed item and fortunately it died in the Arkansas Senate after being passed by the Arkansas House. At that time, after 135 years of political control in Arkansas, Democrats were willing to surrender the people's votes to the East and west coast liberal agenda. As identified in a prior ARRA News Service article:

As an example, if Bill Clinton had won the majority vote in Arkansas for President but had not won the most votes nationwide, then Arkansas electoral votes would NOT have been voted for Bill Clinton. In the last presidential election, the peoples of Arkansas voted in the majority (58.72%) for John McCain and 38.86% voted for Barack Obama and 2.42% voted for other people. Arkansas casts it electoral college votes for John McCain in accordance with the majority vote. However, under the proposed bill, the electoral college votes would have been awarded to Barrack Obama because he won California, New York and other highly populated states. . . .

It was never intended for the President to be elected by popular vote but that the votes by the states should be weighted (thus the electoral votes) thus providing a more fair playing field to represent all of the people of the United States. Only four times in history (1824, 1876, 1888 and 2000) has the electoral college vote not also resulted in the same outcome as the general national popular vote; when more of the people in a larger geographic areas of the US supported a different president than those voting from the highly dense populated areas. The electoral college worked. Much of the reaction to change the electoral college by the democrats is in reaction to the failure of Al Gore to win the presidency. But even in the 2000 Arkansas election, Gore in spite of the fact that President Clinton campaigned in Arkansas for Gore. Bush received 51% of the vote, Gore 46%, Others 3%. . . . This proposed action has been one of the major actions items at the Democratic National Committee . . . .

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