via Richard Winger’s Ballot Access News:
As already noted, today the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state initiative process can be used to change laws affecting congressional elections. Rick Hasen notes today that Article II, which describes the presidency and presidential elections, also says, “the legislature” shall pass election laws concerning presidential elections. It says, “Each State shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors…”. Hasen notes that it now seems obvious that state initiatives can also amend state laws concerning presidential elections.
This is good news for the National Popular Vote movement, which has been trying for years to get state legislatures to pass the National Popular Vote Plan. The group has had some success, but is still not close to meeting the legal requirement that states holding a majority of the electoral college must sign up before the plan goes into effect. No state has passed the plan during 2015. The National Popular Vote organization has been mulling over using the initiative process to approve the plan in certain states. Now the group can feel confident that it is constitutional to use the initiative to advance its idea. Michigan is a state that has the initiative process, and which has a fairly large number of electoral votes, and in which the voters might plausibly approve the plan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_television_markets – add that to the concentration of large donors and large crowds, and spending a lot of time on travel to the sticks becomes inadvisable. If you think major metro areas wouldn’t hold disproportionate sway over the political process, ask the residents of e.g. downstate Illinois or upstate NY.
So Perot 1996 numbers, yet Perot got zero electors under either the current system or NPV in 1992, much less 1996.
Something is better than nothing.
There would be a lot of states that would conceiably be competitive between Democrats and Republicans. They would not all be in the same part of the country, all rural or all urban, etc.
Yes. It could conceivably swing a close national election. At the very least it would add to the reporting of our totals.
In some ways yes, in some ways no.
Under the electoral college or proportional vote by state systems, at least some of the states that are competitive are lower-population states outside the top media markets.
There aren’t necessarily more. You don’t have to have a majority per se if no one bothers to compete for 2/3 or 80% and spends all or almost all their time competing for a somewhat unrepresentative 1/3, 1/4 or 1/5 because they are easier to get to. The rest can be safely ignored unless you expect them to drastically alter their voting patterns in the absence of anyone spending much time to talk to them.
“LOL…that took a while. OK…”
Just browsing through some of the older threads. 😉
“(maybe 1 in TX? FL?)”
TX = 1 / 32 = 3.125% > Nader’s 1.63%
FL = 1 / 25 = 4% > Nader’s 2.15%
The average threshold across the 50 states to change a single EV under state-by-state proportional, would be 9-10% of the vote in that state. That’s a huge and unlikely swing, meaning that most states would not be any more competitive than they are under winner-take-all. For your average minor-party campaign, there would maybe be a total of 4 or 5 EVs on the table from the biggest two or three states, and beyond that their chances of getting EVs would be no better than it is now. It would also have the exact effect you’re worried about NPV having: making only the biggest states (where the threshold to flip an EV is lowest) matter to the candidates, while relegating everybody else to being safely ignored.
And is there really that much value in getting one or two or three electors if it doesn’t affect the outcome? I’m not sure that people would really remember Nader’s campaign any more than they already do, or that it would have any greater impact, had that been the case.
“I don’t have the list in front of me at the momemnt (I think I did put it in some past threads about NPV here if you do a search) but you don’t have to go very far down the list of media markets before you can ignore the rest.”
I’d like to see that list, because I’ve several different refutations of the idea that a national popular vote could be carried by a small handful of the biggest cities. I do see one comment where you said suburbs had to be included, which is fair enough, and you pointed to the list of MSAs (which aren’t the same as media markets but seems like a fair enough proxy). Adding up the top ten of those leaves you with a total population coverage under 90 million, out of ~320 million.
If you’re talking just top 10, then it doesn’t get you anywhere close. And if you’re talking about the top 20 or 30 or 50 biggest metros plus their entire media markets of suburbs and even nearby rural areas- is it really all that unrepresentative at that point? Do voters in the suburbs of Atlanta really have more in common with downtowners in Seattle than they do Georgia voters outside the Atlanta media market?
Yes, candidates can often get a higher payoff in votes by focusing on higher population-density areas, and there’s less payoff for courting more dispersed rural voters at greater cost. That will fairly inevitably be true absent any system that just flagrantly discounts the votes of city-dwellers. But the idea that they could focus *solely* on those areas and ignore everybody else, just doesn’t jive with the reality of US population distribution. It isn’t anything like as lopsided as Chicago/downstate or NYC/upstate. And frankly a lot of the whining about downstate IL and upstate NY not being heard or being marginalized is bogus anyway, more a matter of cultural resentment than political reality. You also hear the exact same complaint in reverse, e.g. with Milwaukee and Madison supposedly being dominated by the rest of non-urban Wisconsin.
Besides, even if it were true that NPV would cause candidates to focus on where the people are: isn’t that kind of the point?. Why is it a problem when urban voters dominate if there actually are more of them? Why should they be governed by a rural minority? What makes somebody special or more deserving of a weighted vote just because they live further apart from their neighbors?
LOL…that took a while. OK…
The latter part is why the first part is incorrect Just using your example alone, Riv-SB is part of the LA media market, although it is a separate SMSA. I don’t have the list in front of me at the momemnt (I think I did put it in some past threads about NPV here if you do a search) but you don’t have to go very far down the list of media markets before you can ignore the rest. That effect actually gets magnified because once you calculate candidate travel time into the mix, the temptation becomes greater to spend more and more time in the biggest metro areas, meet with the biggest donors who live there, speak to the biggest crowds, do the biggest national and regional shows. Look at what happens to the voters who tend to feel marginalized in places like upstate NY and downstate Illinois. It would be kind of like that except nationally.
Which is at least a little better than zero each time, unless your support is regional (Wallace, Thurmond). Even Perot had zero. But Hospers had one thanks to a faithless elector and Nader would have had 2-3 (maybe 1 in TX? FL?) under proportional allocation within each state.
Unlike the Supreme Court, they have to face regular elections for their own offices. Voting for anyone other than the national popular vote plurality winner would come with consequences. I don’t see them doing it.
“With NPV it’s the ability of a relatively small number of media markets to win the election.”
This isn’t really true, just because American population isn’t that concentrated in a handful of major cities. Even the top 25 metro area markets (all the way down to mighty Riverside-San Bernardino), which is hardly a small number, only gets you a third or so of the population. And a lot of media markets cover not just metro areas, but the better part of entire states or entire regions within a state.
“Anything smaller that’s not within those media markets could be safely ignored.”
Ignoring 2/3+ of the voters doesn’t seem like a sound strategy. Though that and worse is the result of the current EC, where effectively one or two or three states get all the attention.
“It makes it possible for more candidates to pick up electoral votes. For example, Nader would have received a few in 2000. That’s not a bad thing.”
He would have gotten two from California one from New York. After that the threshold to earn votes (1/n, n = state’s number of EVs), even in relatively large states, rises so steeply that it would have been well out of his reach. And that’s assuming the vote totals in those states stayed the same, instead of declining because NY and CA voters actually had the potential to affect the EC outcome instead of being safe states, as you pointed out above would also be true of NPV.
“The House would most likely be under a lot of pressure to vote for the national popular vote winner regardless, if the election was thrown into the House in the modern era, which hasn’t happened. There would be all kinds of retaliation if they didn’t, ranging from pork barrel projects in the offending states not being funded, to them losing convention business, facing boycotts, etc, to constitutional amendment, and so on.”
On that I agree, there would be a lot of pressure on the House to do that. Would they? Hard to say. Depends a lot on who the plurality national vote winner was, and who the plurality EC winner was, and if they’re the same person. Which is part of why it’s such an awful provision. Along with the more famous and weirder reasons, the possibility was cited by Perot in ’92 when he dropped out before getting back in.
Any scheme you come up with has a similar flaw. With NPV it’s the ability of a relatively small number of media markets to win the election. Anything smaller that’s not within those media markets could be safely ignored.
It makes it possible for more candidates to pick up electoral votes. For example, Nader would have received a few in 2000. That’s not a bad thing. The House would most likely be under a lot of pressure to vote for the national popular vote winner regardless, if the election was thrown into the House in the modern era, which hasn’t happened. There would be all kinds of retaliation if they didn’t, ranging from pork barrel projects in the offending states not being funded, to them losing convention business, facing boycotts, etc, to constitutional amendment, and so on.
It would be an improvement in some ways, but does have its own interesting potential complications.
The % of the vote it takes to get a single EV would vary widely, depending on what state you’re in. 1.8% in California ranging to 33.4% in Vermont. In states with three or four or five electoral votes, the swing it would take to change their EV split would be so large that they’d basically be the new “safe” states, with a 2-1 or 2-2 split effectively guaranteed for most if not all of them.
Applied on a state-unit basis like that, it could still lead to some pretty disproportionate results, and maybe even more disproportionate results than the current system. It increases the chance of an election being thrown to the House, too (voting as state delegations with one vote per state), which is an awful result.
http://www.fairvote.org/research-reports/fuzzy-math-wrong-way-reforms-for-allocating-electoral-college-votes/
That would be a lot better.
I think that states might switch from winner take all to proportional distribution of the state’s electoral college representatives based upon percentage of vote in order to make the state more relevant.
I think it also has pretty good chances of passing in most states that it could be put on the ballot in. The idea of a popular vote for President is pretty consistently popular among voters, usually with pretty wide margins. It might be a little less likely in red states, but even there the question usually polls supermajority support.
There’s always the variable of how effective or well-funded the No campaign will be, but even with that I think a NPV referendum starts out with such a large advantage it would be heavily favored to pass. The only real hope for killing one, would be confusing or convoluted ballot language or a misleading official title.
National Popular Vote Plan will probably start making headway because the recent US Supreme Court decision from Arizona frees up statewide initiatives for the plan. Of course that is what this whole blog post is about anyway, so I am not saying anything new here. The National Popular Vote Plan people have enough money to do statewide initiatives.
@George Phillies
The plan only goes into effect after states holding an absolute majority of 270 EVs agree to it. It doesn’t matter at all which states those are, nor could it have the partisan effect you’re describing. If a Republican won more popular votes but would have lost the EC under current rules, he would win under NPV just the same as a Democrat in that position.
This gem surfaced after the 2000 election, when Bush won but had fewer popular votes than Gore. The most notable feature..look at the map…is that Democratic states are almost all the states signing up. As a result, the only way the scheme will have an effect is to take an election in which the Democrat by current standards won, the Republican had more votes, and therefore the scheme hands the election to a Republican. The alternative direction would require Republican states to participate, which is not happening.
In addition, suppose the election was very very close. You might want a recount. Non-participating states might decline to waste their money participating. After all, they already know which electors were selected from their state.
The proposal is a constitutional disaster waiting to happen. Fortunately, popular/electoral vote splits are quite rare.
The US Constitution handles presidential elections very differently from congressional elections. Article II says state legislatures can choose presidential electors any way they wish.
No, this doesn’t affect the holding in the U.S. Term Limits v. Thorton case. There, the court ruled that the constitutional requirements for federal offices (age, citizenship, residency) constitute an exclusive list, and so the states can’t add additional limitations like term limits. For the same reason, states can’t ban felons from running for Congress, as many do for state office.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Term_Limits,_Inc._v._Thornton
Does this mean that state legislatures or citizen petitions could pass term limits for Congress? One state still has that option in the state constitution, even though the courts struck it down. That was by citizen petition.
Perhaps if people vote against dividing state electors in terms of presidential elections, then more may eventually support a proposal for a national standard for gaining ballot access, rather than state-specific rules. Thus the slightly larger third parties could have more access, but the smaller ones would have less, since there is less support for them on a national level. And still it doesn’t solve the problem of necessary-evil voting. Probably worse for third parties overall any way you look at it, unless there really happens to be a viable third and fourth candidate that can get a high enough total.
It’s a concern for the few of us who know that. If your question was what would impact vote totals, the “wasted vote” concerns are by far the bigger issue for way, way more people.
Having some people know that some states are “safe” minimizes that a little bit. Not nearly enough, but it’s something.
“I have very rarely heard anyone express such a concern.”
It was a potential issue in 1992. It was the explicit aim of Dixecrat efforts in 1948 and 1968. It’s definitely played a role in presidential election history. Just about every time there’s been a third/ind. candidate getting into 1st or even 2nd place in some states, the possibility becomes a factor.
Not so much recently, but then here haven’t been many recent cases of three or more candidates getting or threatening to get electoral votes.
In my answer to Chuck I meant to say Virginia legislature could let the legislators choose presidential electors for Virginia.
Chuck, it would even be legal for the Virginia legislature to pass a bill saying the legislature will choose the state’s legislatures. People don’t realize the US Constitution says state legislatures don’t need to permit the people to choose the electors at all. And South Carolina chose all the state’s presidential electors from 1789 through 1860.
Passing the National Popular Vote Plan would be good for minor parties, because if enough states passed it, I am sure the country would then decide to do a constitutional amendment for presidential elections. That amendment would probably delete the horrible provision that says if no one gets 50% of the electoral college vote, the US House chooses the president, with each state having one vote. That part of the Constitution is extremely harmful, because if an independent or new party presidential candidate did get lots of electoral votes, but not a majority, that candidate would be doomed because the Democrats and Republicans in the US House would likely defeat that person in the US House vote to pick a president.
We might even get instant runoff voting for President if the country was forced to re-think presidential elections, and having instant runoff voting for president would hugely help minor parties. National Popular Vote, if it succeeds, will shake things up.
Lower. At least some people now realize that they live in “safe” states and can “safely” vote for someone other than an establishment party cadidate (not enough). And of course you’d eliminate any hopes of a faithless elector bringing us publicity.
I have very rarely heard anyone express such a concern.
“Would it be legal for the Virginia legislature to pass a law saying its electoral votes would be awarded to whoever wins Alabama’s popular vote (pressumably, the Republican candidate)?”
They can choose however they like, and in theory that power is plenary and absolute. They could pull names out of a hat, or use a random number generator, appoint the electors themselves, or even designate another state’s popular vote as deciding. That doesn’t seem very likely, but it would be constitutional in the same way the NPVIC is. At least, the only precedent on the topic would strongly suggest so. There might conceivably be an equal protection issue, but that would take a novel and fairly unprecedented argument.
We almost saw this in Florida in the year 2000- their state legislature was ready to award the state’s electors to Bush if the deadline for declaring a winner to the November election wasn’t met. It also happened sporadically throughout the 19th C. I don’t believe any state has ever used anything other than legislative selection or popular election (district-based or winner-take-all) to select their electors, but there isn’t any obvious obstacle to it.
I know this isn’t strictly third-party, but I’m curious what people think NPV would do for third-party and independent candidates. Higher or lower vote totals? I could see it going either way. One the one hand they’ll be less swing-state horse-races to make the two-party race appear closer than it really is. On the other hand, third parties won’t rack up more votes in safe states either, and it will still be plurality-wins FPTP. Would it make a substantive difference at all? Perhaps even more people thinking “my vote counts now” leading to at least a bumper crop of third-party voters the first year? A lot of people point to the EC as being a barrier for third parties, but it isn’t actually so clear that’s the case.
NPVIC would remove the concern, that a serious three-way race doesn’t produce an absolute majority in the EC, and thus gets tossed to a Congress inevitably controlled by one of the two major parties. Under NPV, a third candidate could get a plurality of the popular vote but still win outright in the EC. So at least that’s good. It hasn’t hard to imagine, for example, a scenario where Perot ’92 does slightly better and places 1st in the popular vote but 1st or 2nd in the EC, but then Congress votes along party lines to elect their nominee instead. That would be a fiasco, no matter how it played out.
Suppose Virginia had a majority Republican legislature and a Republican governor leading up to a presidential election, but its demographics were trending Democrat and it was very likely a Democratic presidential candidate would achieve a majority, thus taking all of Virginia’s electoral votes. Would it be legal for the Virginia legislature to pass a law saying its electoral votes would be awarded to whoever wins Alabama’s popular vote (pressumably, the Republican candidate)?