Democrats are up in arms about an effort to change the formula by which several so-called purple states allocate their votes in the Electoral College. The scheme would select the electors by congressional district, thereby increasing the odds, based on recent elections, for the Republicans to win the presidency. No wonder Democrats, and many others, are upset.
Funny, though, that there’s been hardly a peep from the Democrats about an even more radical scheme to change the way the president is elected — the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. This would require a state’s delegates to the Electoral College to vote for whoever wins the national popular vote. Never mind who won in the state the electors come from.
This idea really got going after 2000, when George W. Bush won the presidency even though he lost the national popular vote to Albert Gore. It’s now been ratified, and passed into law, by eight states, who have a total of 132 electoral votes.
Once the compact has been ratified by states with a total of 270 electors (that is, enough to command a majority in the Electoral College, and elect a president), every state that’s ratified it will be required by its own law to order its electors to vote for the winner of the national popular vote.
New York, notably, is halfway there, since the state Senate has ratified the measure.
If the scheme had been in effect in 2004, delegates to the Electoral College from New York would have had to cast the state’s votes for George W. Bush even though John Kerry won the state by a margin of 1.4 million votes.
Call it the purpling of New York.
At the moment, the only institution standing between this scheme and New York state is Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver — who doesn’t seem to be in any rush to embrace the idea.
It may be that Silver’s been persuaded by the pragmatic argument that the whole thing could blow up in his face: What if the scheme handed the White House to a Republican? It’s not hard to imagine some Democratic states trying to back out, with the whole thing winding up in the courts in an even uglier mess than 2000.
Still, Silver hasn’t put out any principled statement in opposition. And the idea seems to be favored by those that hew to the Democratic Party. Every state that’s ratified it — Maryland, Massachusetts, Washington, Vermont, Hawaii, New Jersey, Illinois and California, plus the District of Columbia — votes Democratic. The newspapers endorsing it lean the same way.
One attraction is that it’s much easier than amending the Constitution to actually eliminate the Electoral College; that would require three quarters of the states to approve. The Constitution says in Article II only that electors shall be appointed by each state “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” So the states, including New York, have a free hand.
The question is whether they should play that hand the way their local voters say, or the way the voters in the rest of the country say.
The New York Times endorsed the idea as recently as November. Its editorial complained of “the tarnish of the Electoral College” — even though the candidate the paper endorsed, Barack Obama, had just again won the presidency.
The compact’s most eloquent advocate here is The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg, a former speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter. He has argued that one of the advantages of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is precisely that it doesn’t require a constitutional amendment. So if participating states turn out to be unhappy with the results, they can change the system back.
Well, you could sell the Brooklyn Bridge back, too.
The fact is, the drive for this popular-vote compact is part of a decades-long push by the Left against the idea that the states themselves have their own standing in the federal system. The Left even resents the existence of the Senate, where small states have the same representation as large ones.
In short, the Founders wanted a system that was both national but also accommodated the immortal principle that politics is local.