After the 2000 presidential election which George W. Bush won the majority in the Electoral College but lost the national popular vote, another attack on state soverneinty has gone largely unnoticed. This time it is coming from an organization called National Popular Vote Inc., who describes their effort as a “reform” the Electoral College.
The agreement among the states pledges the electoral votes from each adopting state to the winner of the the national popular vote, regardless of the popular vote in that state. A statement on the group’s website reads “The bill would reform the Electoral College so that the Electoral College reflects the choice of the nation’s voters for the president of the United States. The bill ensures that every vote, in every state, will matter in every presidential election”.
However, New Jersey assemblywoman Alison McHose is leading an effort to repeal the measure in her state. She feels this movement to “nationalize” the vote would disenfranchise individual states and their voters. McHose has stated that “The Electoral College gives two of the great sovereigns that make up our country, the people and the States, the fair opportunity to choose our President, and I will continue to support it”. McHose is correct. The Framers were very concerned of majority rule and the Electoral College was designed to retain the soverneity of each State, respect the right of the minority opinion, and put restrictions on the majority. The proposed agreement by National Popular Vote would make certain states all powerful in the presidential election.
McHose explained the radical change in the Electoral College by National Popular Vote this way: “This agrrement is a back-door attempt to change the way we elect our President. The liberals who want to do away with the Electoral College know they could not get a constitutional amendment through both houses of congress and then ratified by the States, so they concocted this agreement.
They would love big cities and their corrupt urban Democrat machines, such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Washington, D.C. to go unchecked and become where presidential elections are won amd lost. Small rural and suburban communities in Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and New Jersey have importance to our national elections as well as big cities. Our Founding Fathers understood preserving this balance.
McHose’s bill A859 (http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/bills/BillView.asp?BillNumber=A859) would repeal the “Agreement Among the States to Elect the President by National Vote” and amends various parts of the statutory law to remove any reference to the agreement.
Pursuant to the agreement, when enough states collectively possessing the majority of the electoral votes required to decide a presidential race becomes parties to the agreement, New Jersey’s electoral votes will be required to be allocated to the presidential candidate that won the popular vote nationwide, regardless of whether that candidate won in New Jersey
This manner of allocating electoral votes is a radical departure from the current system in New Jersey which, in the winner-take-all manner, the State’s electoral votes are allocated to the candidate that won the popular vote in the State. By requiring that the State’s electoral votes be allocated to the national popular vote winner instead of the candidate who won in New Jersey, the national popular vote agreement disenfranchises New Jersey voters and arguably amounts to the circumvention of the United States Constitution.
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