The NPVIC is not the answer

The Electoral College is a chronic flaw in American democracy.  In 2000 and 2016 -- that is, two of the last six presidential elections -- it awarded the presidency to the candidate who lost the popular vote, thwarting the actual will of the voters.  It induces candidates to focus their campaigns on a few "swing states" which could go either way and thus will decide the election, whereas if elections went purely by the popular vote, every individual's vote would be worth exactly as much as every other, whether cast in Michigan, California, or Wyoming.  Fairly consistently, polling has shown that a majority of Americans want to get rid of the Electoral College.  However, since it is established by the Constitution, abolishing it would require a Constitutional amendment, which means the assent of two-thirds of the House, two-thirds of the Senate, and the legislatures of three-quarters of the states.  In today's political climate, that's effectively impossible.

A much-touted proposed solution to this problem is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC).  This is a kind of treaty between states, under which each state which has agreed to it would award its electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, rather than to the winner of the popular vote within that state as is currently done.  The compact states that it takes effect once it has been adopted by states whose combined electoral votes are more than half of the total electoral votes available -- that is, enough states to decide a presidential election in the Electoral College.  If and when the NPVIC reaches that threshold, every future election's national popular-vote winner will be guaranteed the electoral votes of all the NPVIC states, so that he or she will win the Electoral College.  Problem solved.

It has a real chance of being enacted.  So far seventeen states and DC, with a total of 209 electoral votes, have adopted it; and a further eight states with 79 electoral votes now have it under some degree of active consideration in their legislatures.  If enough of those eight to account for 61 electoral votes adopt it, the NPVIC will take effect.

Unfortunately, while the NPVIC would solve one major problem with our political system, I think it would almost certainly unleash others which might prove even more dangerous and intractable.

First, it sets a precedent that a state's electoral votes can be awarded in a way that completely ignores the popular vote within that state.  The Constitution does not prohibit this; Article II, section 1, paragraph 2 allows each state legislature to decide how that state's electors shall be chosen, and a legislature which adopts the NPVIC is simply making that decision.  It is really only tradition, and attachment to democratic principles, which have always dictated that a state's electoral votes are awarded based on its popular vote.  Once a precedent of abandoning that practice is set, the doors are flung open to a wide range of nasty possibilities.  If a state legislature can ignore the state's popular vote because the national popular vote is more important, it can equally well do so by deciding something else is more important -- say, contriving some pretext whereby one candidate is unqualified or unworthy to be president ("No candidate under whose previous administration illegal border crossings exceeded three million shall be awarded the electoral votes of.....").  A legislature could even give itself the power to appoint electors and then do so as it saw fit, with some claim of democratic legitimacy since legislatures are elected by the people of the state, while in practice gerrymandering means that in some states the legislature is dominated by one party while the state popular vote would go to the other party's presidential candidate.

But the real problem is the risk of elections getting bogged down in legal quagmires.  Imagine that the NPVIC is enacted by enough states to take effect and in the following election it results in one or more states awarding their electoral votes to the candidate who did not win the popular vote in that state.  The party of the other candidate, and groups of his or her voters in that state or states, would immediately file lawsuits challenging the NPVIC on various grounds.  How these would be resolved, and how long it would take, is difficult to guess.  The legal wrangling would be even more intense if the NPVIC resulted in a different candidate actually winning the presidency than under the old system.  It would be even worse than the mess in Florida in 2000.  Whichever side ultimately prevailed, the new president's perceived legitimacy would be diminished and perhaps openly challenged by state governments run by the opposite party, especially if the losing candidate refused to recognize the outcome.  We don't want a political system in which the actual voting is the mere starting gun for endless rounds of squabbling in court which would end up determining the outcome.  Trump and Kari Lake have already tried to force that upon us by legal attacks on the elections they lost, but their claims were rejected in every court because they had no substance or supporting evidence.  Legal challenges to the NPVIC would carry a lot more weight and would be taken seriously.

Whether this kind of mess would be worse than the present system, under which the real winner can "lose" due to a weird eighteenth-century anachronism, is a matter of opinion.  I think it actually might be.  At the very least, we'd be steering the country into unknown waters and possibly an unprecedented crisis of governmental legitimacy, at a time of serious internal polarization and danger overseas.  This is just not a time when the rest of the democratic world can afford to have the US preoccupied with prolonged internal legal squabbling and emerge with a weakened president.

There's another option.  As I've discussed here extensively, each of the two big parties has embraced some policies and ideologies which are extremist, radical, or just flat-out crazy, and which seriously turn off mainstream voters.  Whichever party is the first to comprehensively and convincingly repudiate such stuff will start winning elections by landslides -- including the presidency -- regardless of the Electoral College.  (As it is, the Republicans look increasingly likely to lose in a landslide this year because of doubling down on one of their worst radicalisms, forced-birthism.)  Listen to the voters and go where they are, rather than lecturing them and trying to drag them to where you are, and you will prevail despite the flaws in the system.

Truths and inspirations for 23 April 2024

If something's hard to see or read, click to enlarge.

(For the link round-up, click here.)

I found these two images together in an image round-up on a right-wing blog, exactly like this.  The way those people eat, they probably do face a serious risk of stroke as young as their forties.

What an irredeemably disgusting book.

The good that comes from capitalism comes via competition.  These ever-growing agglomerations undermine that, and should not be allowed.