No thanks to national popular vote

By Matthew Gagnon

On Monday in Augusta, the Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee heard public testimony on the merits of LD 1578, which is a bill that is being considered this legislative session that essentially seeks to undermine the Electoral College by signing Maine onto a very peculiar interstate compact.

Opponents of the Electoral College have long sought to eliminate it, and replace it with a “national popular vote.” This sentiment has been around for a long time, but the movement has been given new energy in the last couple of decades by the elections of 2000 and 2016, both of which produced winners who had fewer votes nationwide. 

The problem that these critics have, though, is that the system we use to elect a president is set firmly in the U.S. Constitution, and there is no interpretive ambiguity about the meaning of language in Article II. If you want to get rid of it, you need to change the Constitution.

That is a very difficult hurdle. In the entire history of this country, we have only amended our charter document 27 times. The ratification hurdle of three-fourths of the states needing to approve an amendment is a big reason why we haven’t changed the document since 1992. 

But what if, instead of amending the Constitution to get rid of the Electoral College, we simply went around it?

That is what is being proposed by advocates of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

To briefly explain what they want to do, proponents argue that states can permanently ensure that the winner of the popular vote will actually win the election by gathering enough of them together to account for more than the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. If enough states sign on to reach the 270 threshold, then each state would change their election laws to award their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote.

Thus far, the only states that have signed onto the compact are reliably liberal blue states — 17 in total — that are likely not happy that the Electoral College has burned them twice recently. Those states account for 205 electoral votes, meaning that only 65 additional votes are necessary to make the compact a reality. 

There are, of course, more than a few problems with this whole idea. Setting aside the eternally frustrating debate over the Electoral College itself, there are other, less partisan concerns. 

For instance, what we call the popular vote is really nothing more than an informal collection of state totals reported in the media. While each state would eventually certify their individual totals, we also would be asking states to certify election results from 49 states they do not have any hand in administering. 

Many of those states have wildly divergent rules about who can vote, when they can vote, and how they can vote. Felons can vote in some states, but not others. Some states require identification to vote, and others don’t. Some allow same-day voter registration, while others don’t. North Dakota doesn’t even have a voter registration system. 

These differing rules mean that the citizens who want to vote and be counted in this new national popular vote system will not be granted equal access, bringing up a fundamental question of fairness.

Also, what happens when we have a very close election, nationwide? In the 2000 election, 105.4 million people voted and the popular vote margin was only 543,895 votes, or 0.52 percent. This is well within many states’ automatic recount threshold. So who orders a nationwide recount? In all states, or just close states? Do we do one at all? Does anyone know?

And then there’s the question of voting itself. There are academic studies that show that voters are far less likely to vote the more diffused their influence is, something talked about at length in economist Bryan Caplan’s book, “The Myth of the Rational Voter.” My vote is currently one among 929,017 registered voters in Maine. If this compact passes, it will be one among 161.4 million voters nationwide. 

In an already apathetic nation, what effect will diminishing the relative value of an individual vote have on participation? 

And that says nothing about the considerable legal questions and constitutional challenges that exist related to this idea that remain unsettled, or the difficulty of dealing with Maine and Alaska’s ranked-choice voting systems within this context.

Or, of course, the foolishness of throwing away the only leverage Maine has for candidate attention in presidential elections. 

The point is, as clever as this idea sounds, even if you don’t like the Electoral College, I don’t think you should sign on to this idea. There are too many problems with it that have nothing to do with politics or partisanship.