Popular vote plan would make Electoral College irrelevant

A reader sent us an e-mail this week expressing concern that there hasn't been much press coverage of Illinois House Bill 1685, recently signed by Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

Actually, it turned out we had a lengthy story on it right after it was signed, but just in case you missed it, here's what's going on.

House Bill 1685 is Illinois' part of a nationwide, state-by-state effort to change the way the Electoral College votes are distributed.

The law makes Illinois the third state - Maryland and New Jersey are the others - to sign on to an effort to make the national popular vote the basis for determining who is elected president.

It does this not by abolishing the Electoral College - which would require an amendment to the U.S. Constitution - but rather by an agreement among the states to award that state's electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the popular vote.

Currently, that is done on a state-by-state basis, with each state giving its electoral votes to the candidate who wins in that state. The Constitution doesn't specify how this must be done, and every state save two award the votes on a winner-take-all basis in that state. Maine and Nebraska award electoral votes by Congressional district.

Under what is called the National Popular Vote plan, states would agree to give their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote.

This contract among the states is a pretty long way from coming into being, even though there are efforts under way in most states. The three that have passed it have a total of 46 electoral votes. States with a total of 270 electoral votes have to pass this because that is the number of electoral votes necessary to determine the winner in a presidential election.

Had this been in force in 2004, for instance, when George W. Bush won the national popular vote (and enough electoral votes to be elected) but Illinois went for John Kerry, the Illinois electoral votes would have gone to Bush.

The main idea behind this is to eliminate the situation that occurred in 2000, where Al Gore won the nationwide popular vote but Bush got more electoral votes and hence became president.

I have a lot of qualms about this.

To be sure, one man, one vote is more purely democratic and one can argue it matters not whether that one vote comes from a large state or a small one.

On the other hand, in the Electoral College each state gets its number of electoral votes based on its number of congressmen and senators. And since every state has two senators, this helps to even out the playing field just a little bit for the smaller states. That was the intent of the Founding Fathers. Much of the Constitution is about protecting the minority, and in this case the smaller states with fewer congressional seats but still the same number of Senate seats are the minority.

If the Electoral College is going to be changed - in this case made irrelevant - it would be much cleaner, and harder, to do it by constitutional amendment.

The promulgators of the National Popular Vote plan seem to think making this contract among the states will pass legal muster.

But if they get enough states to sign on, there will certainly be a debate among constitutional scholars - and a dandy case someday for the U.S. Supreme Court.

Contact Tim West at west @scn1.com or 630-416-5290.