A QUIET COUP: BALKANIZING THE US BY ELIMINATING THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE

 

 

The “one person one vote” system is often proclaimed as the centerpiece of what is generally thought of as majoritarian “democracy”. We use the term democracy far too loosely. This misuse of the concept ignores the terms under which real democracies must operate. This includes the limits to scale that allows democracy to function effectively, and the need to prevent the abuses that inevitably emerge when a numerical majority realizes its members can “game” the system and direct most of the benefits to themselves and responsibilities to others.  In any event the United States is not a democracy.  It is a constitutional representative republic. 

 

There are increasing calls for US presidential elections to be changed.  One approach involves states allocating their Electoral College votes proportionally according to the percent of votes each candidate receives from voters eligible to vote in that state. Another shift, a key part of a strategy drafted in 2006 and not yet operative but gaining signatories, is called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.  The Compact seeks to effectively change presidential elections from the Constitutionally-mandated Electoral College system of the Twelfth Amendment--while appearing to maintain that system.  In doing so the Compact would implement a system of total national vote counts in which slightly more than one-third of American states, plus the District of Columbia with more than 90% of its voters supporting Clinton, to control the outcomes of presidential elections.

 

Advocates of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact know it is extremely unlikely they could gain the required approval of three-fourths of US states to create a national vote simple majority amendment to the US Constitution in place of the Twelfth Amendment’s Electoral College system.   Recognizing that it would be almost impossible to achieve their aims by means of a constitutional amendment, advocates have launched a takeover strategy by means of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.  The goal is to effectively amend the US Constitution without following Constitutional procedures.

 

Once the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is looked at closely it becomes clear it would disenfranchise a significant number of voters in states not located on the East and West coasts. The Compact would also empower a handful of massive urban areas such as Chicago, New York, Washington DC, Atlanta, Miami, Los Angeles and San Francisco, whose voters’ views and agendas tend to be dramatically different from those located beyond the close-in metropolitan areas.  Taken together, the joining of the coastal member states of the Compact with the most heavily populated urban areas would control the outcomes of presidential elections. 

 

The Compact is an attempt at a “quiet coup”.   As discussed in this analysis, the Compact would violate the overriding purpose of the Twelfth Amendment and the Electoral College system—that of protecting states through the system of federalism that forms a fundamental part of the American Republic. Under the Compact the presidential candidate receiving the largest number of votes nationally among the 50 states and the District of Columbia would receive all the electoral votes of the states participating in the Compact, and would do so even if a participating state’s own citizen vote did not follow the national vote.  The Compact would still grant that state’s Electoral Votes to the candidate with the largest national vote count.  This is likely to be one of the Compact’s fatal flaws.  Another significant obstacle is found in Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 of the US Constitution itself and its requirement that compacts between states receive Congressional approval. 

 

The choice of President under the Twelfth Amendment, added to the Constitution in 1804, is not intended to be a generalized national majority vote process representing all votes received nationally no matter where they are cast.  The Twelfth Amendment’s process of choice is by a majority of the individual states’ Electoral College votes cast according to the voting preferences of citizens entitled to vote in each particular state.  Subordinating that Constitutionally required process to the collective actions of states outside an individual state’s “sovereignty” and Constitutional duty under the Twelfth Amendment as part of the “supreme law of the land” would effectively amend the Constitution outside the sole procedures stipulated for doing so.

 

If the US wants to shift to a national popular vote system for electing a president, it needs to do so by means of a legitimate Constitutional amendment rather than a backdoor strategy that, if allowed, would undermine the deeper integrity of the American Constitution on which our Rule of Law is grounded.