The One-Two Punch to Knock Out Electoral Democracy

... As of this writing 15 states and the District of Columbia, each with 196 electoral votes, purport to have ratified it. According to its terms as few as three more states (say Texas, Michigan, and Pennsylvania) with 74 electoral votes need to enact the bill for it to go into effect. Should it go into effect, the compacting states, together accumulating a majority of the Electoral College, will cast their electoral votes for whomever is the plurality winner of what the scheme’s backers call “the national popular vote”: whichever presidential and vice-presidential slate gets a plurality of votes when the total votes of all the states (compacting and non-compacting) are aggregated.

The scheme, of course, is an effort to change the Constitution without the bother of securing the consent of three-fourths of the states that the Article V Amendment procedure requires. It is also of questionable validity without the consent of Congress.

While the Supreme Court might rule against allowing an interstate compact to go into effect without the prior Congressional consent that the Constitution’s Article I section 10 requires for states to enter into interstate compacts, it also might not....

Yet the basic reason why the so-called National Popular Vote scheme threatens democracy is that it does not, and cannot, enact a national popular vote that is nationally regulated and supervised. The whole scheme rests on the constitutionally entrenched state control of the selection of presidential electors. What its backers call the “national popular vote” is, as they themselves acknowledge, the aggregate of votes in 51 separate jurisdictions with 51 separate sets of ballot access laws, voter identity checks, and voter eligibility requirements....

Nothing in this scheme, for example, requires that any participating state let any particular candidate on the ballot....

In states like Washington and Oregon, which have only mail-in balloting, or in states like California, which allow absentee voting without any demonstrated need, federal authorities cannot in practice keep officials from flooding or allowing activists to flood the “state popular vote” with out-of-state residents with fake addresses, who mail in ballots in every state for which they can download and send in a ballot, or outright ghost voters who are nothing more than a name and a fake registration. With the electoral college as it is, one-party states like California can allow as much fraud and force as they like, but they can only swing their own state’s electoral votes....

The importance of the Electoral College, by Fred Elbel, CAIRCO, May 23, 2019.

Don’t let Colorado be an Electoral College dropout, by Mike Rosen, Complete Colorado, February 5, 2019.

An end-run around the Electoral College, by Peter Skurkissm, American Thinker, February 28, 2019.

Prelude to a Revolution, National Popular Voting, by Don Mellon, Canada Free Press, March 16, 2019.