>On Tuesday, Nevada became the latest state to pass a bill that would grant its electoral votes to whoever wins the popular vote across the country, not just in Nevada. The movement is the brainchild of John Koza, a co-founder of National Popular Vote, an organization that is working to eliminate the influence of the Electoral College.
I don't think this will survive constitutional challenge, because it is not the voters of the state who are deciding how the state's electors are decided. For example, would it be allowed for a swing state such as Florida which now has a Republican governor and state legislature, to pass a law stating that their state's electors would be allocated based on how Alabama votes? That way, even if the Democratic candidate won a majority of votes in Florida, the electors would still go to the Republican candidate if the Republican candidate wins in Alabama.
> I don't think this will survive constitutional challenge, because it is not the voters of the state who are deciding how the state's electors are decided.
Is this US constitutional law or Nevada constitutional law that I'm not familiar with? There's no law I'm familiar with against faithless electors and Ray v. Blair made it clear that states are allowed to exclude electors if they won't pledge their support a certain way. Finally, article 2 clause 2 of the US constitution gives fairly broad leeway on how states assign their electors.
I could be mistaken though. Outside observers from other countries often are.
It’s a shame most of these comments are debating the merits of the Electoral College, skipping right past the much more interesting & relevant argument of whether the NPV compact is constitutional.
I agree with you that it’s not. States can indeed choose electors with any constitutional method they wish, but if they hold a statewide election, it has to be a fair election or it will run afoul of the 14th Amendment.
How is NPV "unfair"? It is more in the spirit of the 14th than the winner-take-all system, where your vote means more or less depending on where you live (which was a core part of the 14th amendment logic of Gore v Bush)
States don’t get to hold elections for statewide officials (e.g. electors) where some votes are effectively discarded because of some fact external to that state election. Adding up votes from other states isn’t materially different in that regard than performing an augury.
For the same reason, the Western states couldn’t engage in a pact to elect their governors by party slate (especially without triggering the interstate compacts clause).
And why not? The constitution says that the states can choose their electors for President any way they see fit. They can be named directly in the law if the legislature wanted them to: "Our Electors are Joe Bloggs, James Jameson, and Person McPersonface". There is no constitutional limit on how a state can choose its electors.
When states started switching from the original plan of "electoral districts" to "winner-take-all", Hamilton and Madison decried it as contrary to the spirit of the Constitution, but recognized that they couldn't do anything about it because the text of the constitution says "in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct", and Hamilton's amendment to strike that clause and replace it with an explicit by-district electoral process failed.
It seems like failing a constitutional challenge is the best case.
Electors don’t actually have to vote the way state law tells them to—that would require a constitutional amendment that restructures the whole process. When they vote counter to state law, they are called “faithless electors”.
A state system which ignores the will of its constituents is going to be much more susceptible to faithless electors, who may face tremendous incentives and pressure to trade votes.
I would expect the first such election to lead to the dissolution of the republic.
Please stop spouting nonsense, none of this is true.
Faithless electors are electors who vote contrary to the opinion of their state. In some states this is legal, in other states it isn't, the constitution has nothing to do with it.
The states are free to outlaw faithless electors and many of them already do.
If you are going to accuse someone of "spouting nonsense", it would behoove you to know the facts on the ground, not just have a vague notion.
Some states have laws about how faithless electors "must" vote. The only related case to reach SCOTUS was regarding "pledge" laws, which require electors to pledge they will be faithful. The court has not ruled on laws requiring a certain vote or punishments for violating such laws. There is a case winding its way through the courts on the issue, and different courts have come to different conclusions (the latest of which is to rule them unconstitutional).
Technically every single voter in Nevada could vote for one candidate yet under certain circumstances all their votes would go to the the opposing candidate under the Compact.
Yeah, I don't think all the people in smaller states falling over themselves to join the Compact are really thinking this through.
The argument "but the majority of people in Nevada could vote for candidate X and candidate Y could still carry their state?" is true, yet a little misleading; the net effect of the Pact is to effectively weight all votes equally at a national level rather than a state level. If you believe that the condition we have now -- that the majority of people in the United States could vote for candidate X and candidate Y could still win the election -- then this is an improvement, even if it's effectively a hack of the electoral college system to make it behave as if it wasn't there at all.
I don't think this will survive constitutional challenge, because it is not the voters of the state who are deciding how the state's electors are decided. For example, would it be allowed for a swing state such as Florida which now has a Republican governor and state legislature, to pass a law stating that their state's electors would be allocated based on how Alabama votes? That way, even if the Democratic candidate won a majority of votes in Florida, the electors would still go to the Republican candidate if the Republican candidate wins in Alabama.