Gov. Cuomo’s signing of the National Popular Vote compact has gotten surprisingly little coverage. If the measure had been in effect in 2004, it would’ve delivered the state’s electoral votes to George W. Bush, although New Yorkers voted for John Kerry by a margin of 18 percentage points.
The idea of the compact is to elect our presidents by popular vote, even though not enough states want to amend the Constitution. It is animated by fury on the Left over the fact that Vice President Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000 but failed to win in the Electoral College, which cost him victory.
To change the Constitution itself would take a two-thirds majority of each house of the Congress and a ratification by three quarters of the states. To get around that, the compact Cuomo signed would simply bind the signatory states to instruct their delegates to the Electoral College to vote for the winner of the popular vote nationwide.
The compact would go into effect once enough states have signed it to account for 270 electoral votes, the same number that is needed to elect a president in a two-person race. This doesn’t do away with the Electoral College. It works through it. The compact exploits the constitutional rule that states can select their electors however they want.
It’s startling how the fast support for this measure changed here in New York. It’s true that the states that have ratified the compact — Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois, Hawaii, Washington, Massachusetts, Vermont, California, Rhode Island, and now New York — tend to vote Democratic. But the measure wasn’t always popular here.
When it first came up in the state Senate several years ago, sentiment was far more tepid than today, though it passed. Since then, Conservative Party Chairman Michael Long tells me, his own thinking has “evolved.” He now sees the measure as in the strategic interest of conservative reformers.
The complaint is not that the existing system often elects a president who failed to win a majority of the national vote; that’s happened only four times in 225 years. It’s rather that the current system focuses the campaign on fewer than a dozen swing states.
“It was clear to me,” Long says, “that both Democrats and Republican candidates, the only time they came to New York was to get money.”
“The time has come that every vote should count, every candidate should be forced to campaign in every nook, corner, and crevice in the entire country,” Long argues. He thinks that this would bring out a conservative vote that has hung back — because the winner in, say, Oklahoma is so often the GOP and in New York the Democrats.
Long is prepared to gamble that a national popular-vote system would net out in favor of those who oppose abortion, favor low taxes and back the right to bear arms.
The measure cleared the state Senate in Albany by a vote of 57 to four. But it’s not just Long’s Conservatives who back it; the quasi-Marxist Working Families Party also supports the interstate compact.
“When Marty Golden and Velmanette Montgomery vote the same way, you have to start scratching your head,” Sen. Joseph Griffo told me, referring to two polar-opposite senators from Brooklyn.
Griffo led the passage of the measure in the Senate; he argues it’ll make upstate votes count in national elections, where they’re now drowned out by New York City and its suburbs.
New York’s most avid advocate of the idea is journalist Hendrik Hertzberg. A writer for The New Yorker and a former speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, he bets the measure would increase voter participation from all quarters. He argues that we should elect the president the way we elect governors, representatives and dog catchers.
The National Popular Vote compact has now been approved by states accounting for 61 percent of the 270 electoral votes needed for the deal to go live. The next big target state is Connecticut.
Hertzberg reckons that we could have the compact in effect by 2020, maybe as early as 2016.
Whether we really want to cast aside the system that gave us Washington, Lincoln and Reagan, I’m not so sure. My instinct is that we want to strengthen the states. But Hertzberg argues that if we try the compact and don’t like it, it’s far easier to drop out of it than to amend the Constitution.
Hmmmm. Sounds like buying the Brooklyn Bridge with a money-back guarantee.