National Popular Vote: The Winner Ought to Win

It’s 2020, not 1787, and the winner of the national popular vote should logically win the Presidency in a well-established and modern nation such as ours. I proudly and without reservation support moving to the National Popular Vote system. Colorado passed a bill in 2019 (SB 19-042) that makes us a member of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, but a group has gathered enough petition signatures to run a ballot measure in 2020 that could overturn the law. I ask you, the reader, to vote to support SB-042, (this would mean a “yes” vote on the 2020 ballot measure), and I’m writing to explain a whole bunch of reasons why.

First and foremost, I’m embarrassed as an American that a candidate who lost the popular vote by 2.9 million votes could win the nation’s highest elected office. Furthermore, I’ve seen stories suggesting that the same candidate could potentially lose by 5 million votes in 2020 yet still win in the Electoral College. On top of that, two out of the last three Presidents won an election in the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote, and this has happened five times in our nation’s history. It’s unacceptable to me no matter who that candidate is, and it should be unacceptable to you, but we have the chance to fix it and we shouldn’t let things slip backward with the 2020 Colorado ballot measure.

NPV seems like an obvious choice to me, but as I talk to people, I learn that a lot of folks don’t fully understand NPV or the history behind the Electoral College system we have today. And that’s not surprising. The Electoral College is the only system most Americans have lived under, and many of us take the whole thing for granted every four years without much consideration. But the 2016 election sparked a lot of interest in changing the system, along with some of the more detailed pros and cons of NPV or the current use of the Electoral College.

Below, I’ve divided some of my thoughts into two main sections. First, there’s a short version for people who want to learn a bit but don’t want to spend a lot of time. But in my opinion, there are some really interesting geeky, wonky considerations that don’t easily boil down well into a paragraph or three. My second section goes into greater depth, and I hope readers will check it out.

No matter what, as it stands in early 2020 NPV has passed in 15 states plus Washington D.C., giving NPV 196 out of the 270 Electoral votes it needs to go into effect. It’s within striking distance, probably not for 2020 but perhaps for another election in the 2020s. I hope you will join me in voting to protect SB 19-042 and to keep Colorado’s nine Electoral votes (possibly 10 after the next census) in the NPVIC.

THE SHORT VERSION: WHY I SUPPORT NPV

The Winner Wins (Imagine That!): Under NPV, the winner of the popular vote wins. Why overthink? This is literally how most elections work throughout the United States. I don’t want you to stop reading here, but you could, because it’s really that simple.

It’s Completely Mathematical: Under NPV, there would be no difference in the value of individual votes, relative to Electoral votes, based on state or district of residence. You simply add up the votes. Under the current Electoral College system, there are some pretty wide differences in value between states, plus the differences are not equalized from state to state under any precise mathematical formula.

This link includes a chart ranking states by “vote weight,” basically state popular vote totals relative to Electoral votes. Readers will notice a very wide discrepancy between #1 Wyoming at 2.97 (higher numbers equal more value per individual vote, “1.0” would be a perfect balance) and #51 Florida at 0.78. There’s even a wide discrepancy between the smaller states ranking #1-10, as you can see in the chart at left. Coloradans who will be voting on the 2020 ballot measure ought to take note that we ranked a very poor #49 (0.82 vote weight) under this measure, which is not the kind of ranking I want as a Coloradan to support!

More States Would Matter: Under Electoral College “winner-take-all” systems, campaigns tend to focus heavily on “battleground states” in which polling or past history suggests there will be close elections. In recent cycles, this has meant big prizes like Florida and Pennsylvania, and a relative handful of other states including at times Colorado. Campaigns won’t typically spend a lot of resources in dependably red or blue states, because the outcomes are quite predictable. Under NPV, every vote counts the same no matter what state it comes from, so it will be worth campaigning in more than the typical small number of battleground states we have every four years.

Actual numbers from the 2016 election bear this out. About two-thirds of Presidential candidate general election appearances were in just six states, and about 94% of these appearances were in only 12 states total. And these appearances weren’t just in large states – 21 events were held in New Hampshire, which only has four Electoral votes, but Clinton won the state’s popular vote by a mere 2,736 votes (46.8-46.5%), so fighting in this tiny battleground appears to have been worth it. But those who look at the link in this paragraph will notice a near-complete lack of visits to small states in which the winner was predictable far in advance.

For fun, you can check out this GIF from fivethirtyeight.com which shows exactly where Clinton and Trump held campaign rallies over the last 10 weeks of the 2016 campaign. You’ll notice heavy concentrations in Florida, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina – plus that Clinton maybe should have visited Wisconsin…

Runner-up Votes Count: Under Electoral College “winner-take-all” systems, votes for runner-up candidates count for absolutely nothing. That’s the case even if the results are as close as 50.1% to 49.9%. Under NPV, votes for runner-up candidates will be added into the national count and could contribute to electing a President. But in Colorado 2016, 1,441,377 votes that weren’t cast for Clinton – almost 52% of the state – had zero value in the tally that mattered.

Margins Would Matter: In “winner take all” states, 100% of Electoral votes go to the statewide popular vote winner, no matter the margin of victory. This means big margins do not translate into extra value in the Electoral College. For illustration, the 4.3 million vote margin between Clinton and Trump in California 2016 was literally larger than the entire vote totals of 10 states combined. Under NPV, every one of these marginal votes in California would matter, but today they don’t.

And on the flip side, the contested 537-popular-vote margin in Florida 2000 (out of nearly 6 million votes cast) actually decided the fate of 25 Electoral votes – just less than 10% of what it takes to win the entire Presidency, and enough to give Bush II his first term in office.

Big States Can’t Win on Their Own: Opponents to NPV will message that candidates of the future will only need to campaign in California and New York. That’s statistically wrong, almost ridiculous if you really look at the numbers, but I see it all the time on social media and I encourage you to call BS next time you see it. In 2016, Hillary voters in California only accounted for 6.4% of the national popular vote, and only 3.3% in New York. You can’t win a popular election with 9.7% of the vote! And to be bipartisan, Trump only earned about 3.4% of the national popular vote in both Florida and Texas, states Trump won which had the second and third-largest state voter turnouts respectively in 2016. You can’t win with 6.8% either.

Minor Parties Will Finally Show Up in the Official Tally: Under today’s Electoral College system, minor-party candidates have only a very small likelihood of ever earning Electoral votes. Even Ross Perot’s nearly 19% of the national popular vote in 1992 failed to earn him a single Electoral vote. The third-place finisher in 2016, Libertarian Gary Johnson, received nearly 4.5 million popular votes, but again zero Electoral votes. Under NPV, minor-party votes will be added up in a nationwide tally. Minor-party candidates might still not win the election, but they will at least show up on the scorecard and they’ll be able to see how much they need to grow to become competitive.

Tougher to be a Minor-Party Spoiler: Today, some voters will vote for candidates they don’t like because of “winner take all” systems (i.e. the “holding my nose” vote, or the dreaded “lesser of two evils”). In battleground states, a narrow popular vote victory normally means a candidate gets 100% of the Electoral votes, so voting minor-party out of principle – or even as a member of the given minor party – can risk giving a candidate the voter REALLY dislikes all of the votes that matter. Under NPV, it would be much less risky for any one individual in a closely-divided state to vote minor-party, because the final tally is spread out over all 50 states plus D.C., and it won’t matter which state any single vote comes from.

The U.S. Constitution DOES NOT Say How Electors are to Vote: Political operatives will try to tell you that state Electors voting for the winner of a national popular vote is unconstitutional, but make sure you ask people who say this to give a constitutional citation for proof. Spoiler alert – they can’t. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say Electors have to vote for a statewide or district popular vote winner, but if you don’t believe me, read it yourself from Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution:

“Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.“

Also, from Article 2, Clause 3:

“The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each; which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted. The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President…”

In fact, seven Electoral votes were cast in 2016 for candidates who weren’t even on the ballot – three for Colin Powell, and one each for Faith Spotted Eagle, Bernie Sanders, John Kasich, and Ron Paul. Two states (Maine and Nebraska) award one Electoral vote to winners of popular votes in congressional districts, along with two to the state popular vote winner. About 30 states have laws requiring all state Electors to vote for the winner of the state popular vote, while others allow “faithless Electors” to vote for pretty much whomever they please. In short, state laws like SB 19-042 determine how states award Electoral votes, and if the Constitution required any single system nationwide, there wouldn’t be multiple systems legally in existence today.

It’s Not Just About Trump or the GOP: I’m going to go way out on a limb and admit the Trump presidency hasn’t been great for me, plus I’m a registered Democrat and don’t support many Republicans. However, I would accept the legitimacy of a GOP popular vote victory, and it’s happened six times over the course of my life (Nixon twice in 1968 and 1972, Reagan twice in 1980 and 1984, Bush I in 1988, and Bush II in 2004). So many things in life tend to be cyclical, and a GOP popular vote victory could certainly happen again under favorable circumstances, like a great GOP candidate vs. a weak Dem or if a Dem candidate is marred by scandal, assuming scandal matters anymore. And if the votes are counted fairly, I would have no problem with this verdict.

We’ll Still Be a Republic: Opponents will tell you that the U.S. is a republic, not a democracy – and you can agree with them yet still favor NPV and remain logically consistent. Under NPV, the system of government would not change one iota. You’d still have three branches of government, a Congress based on state and/or district representation, and NPV would not change the powers or duties of the President. The only thing that would change would be the method of electing our President, and it would with a few differences become a popular vote election like nearly every other election in America.

And remember, the U.S. Constitution did not invent the “republic” in 1787, nor did it create the only valid structure for a republic. This web page alone shows a list of hundreds of republics throughout history, some dating back to around 600 B.C.!

Colorado’s Not Small Anymore: For my last point in this section, let’s remember I’m writing mostly because we’ll have a Colorado ballot measure in 2020. People might tell you small states “like Colorado” will get ignored under NPV, usually also mentioning California and New York in the same statement. Of course Colorado is smaller than California in population, but we’re also much smaller in the Electoral College – California has 55 Electoral votes with Colorado at nine.

Still, Colorado is no longer a small state. We’re 21st in the nation in population, and we’ll probably cast more than 3 million popular votes in 2020, which is larger than the margin between Clinton and Trump in 2016. Plus, we’re growing, with at least one projection saying we’ll increase from about 5.5 million today to about 8 million by 2040. For illustration, a population of 8 million would put us just behind today’s Virginia, which is the 12th largest state in the Union. This is a long way of saying it would be incredibly foolish for any future campaign to ignore Colorado and its growing numbers under NPV.

PART TWO: DEEPER CUTS

“It wasn’t like the Founders said, ‘Hey, what a great idea! This is the preferred way to select the chief executive, period. They were tired, impatient, frustrated. They cobbled together this plan because they couldn’t agree on anything else.” – George Edwards, professor emeritus of political science, Texas A&M University

The Founding Fathers Thought What?: Yes, I expect the Founding Fathers to come up often during this year’s debate over NPV, but I don’t expect discourse to be all that great. A handful of historians and constitutional scholars might be well-versed enough to supply decent narratives, relevant quotes or passages, but most of the rest of us really don’t understand their views that well – and why should we? We weren’t there at the time, plus half of us probably slept through high school civics and never studied further. Expect lots of misinterpretation or intentional mismessaging or cherry-picking or awful memes about what the Founders stood for, especially on social media.

I would like to frame some of the rest of this piece by uttering a little heresy – it’s 2020, and time to question if opinions from individual Founders should automatically trump practical solutions to modern-day problems anyway. To be crystal clear, I’m just talking about opinion here, and not what’s actually currently in the Constitution, which is the law of the land though implementation can depend heavily on judicial interpretation. We can disagree with Supreme Court decisions of the past while Justices even differ among themselves, and we can criticize the opinions of Lincoln or FDR, all of whom benefited from lessons about how our system works in practice – yet for some reason people feel we can’t question Founders? Times have changed drastically and we as a nation ought to at least consider what ideas from the 1780s still work for us and what ought to be amended or replaced.

Let’s remember, the nation’s Founders didn’t create an Electoral College right off the bat. The first formal system of U.S. governance was the Articles of Confederation (approved in 1777, ratified in 1781, replaced by the Constitution in 1789). The U.S. government under the Articles did not even include a President as we know it today, only a presiding officer of Congress who was not a chief executive. We had 10 such presiding officers before George Washington became President, and chances are great most of us have only heard of one of them, John Hancock (well, history geeks probably know of John Jay).

So, the Founders who drafted the Articles without an Electoral College were overruled by an entirely new Constitution after about 12 years, and the original version of the Electoral College from 1787 was modified by the 12th Amendment, ratified in 1804. Americans of 200+ years ago were able to change when things weren’t working properly, and I think it’s past time to have a well-reasoned discussion about changing our system of electing our President again in the 2020s.

Why do we have Electors Anyway?: Let’s be clear – in modern times, a state like Colorado can count all 3 million popular votes with great accuracy, and there’s no “ease in counting” reason to reduce our official tally from said 3 million voters into votes from just nine Electors. The original idea behind having Electors – as people – was to assemble a group of highly qualified citizens, separate from the government and at the time not beholden to popular vote election results, to cast the votes that would decide who would become President. Picture 13 regional boards of directors voting on hiring a CEO, as opposed to relying completely on the results of a national stockholder election, and you’ll be closer to understanding the original function of the Electoral College. The use of the Electoral College in practice would change, but let’s stay in the distant past for a few paragraphs.

Fans of Alexander Hamilton might find it interesting to look through Federalist Papers Chapter 68 to better understand his rationale for what became the Electoral College, if you enjoy the torture of trying to decipher Hamilton’s writing from 1787. But here’s one illustrative quote for those pressed for time – “…the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station.”

Remember, it’s 1787 in an almost brand-new new nation. Universal schooling was not yet required, universal suffrage was many years away, only a relatively small number of U.S. colleges existed, many newcomers to the U.S. were literally figuring out how to survive, long-distance transportation was a real challenge, and a host of informational tools were yet to be invented – the internet, TV, and radio tops among them. There could have been a legitimate reason for an elite board to choose a President in 1787, partially because it was difficult for many people to attain the necessary level of knowledge to make well-informed decisions, or even have the time or ability to participate deeply in the political process.

Fast-forward to 2020, and I’d argue without hesitation that thousands of Coloradans would be perfectly acceptable Electors, especially given that the primary job in Colorado is almost always to simply confirm the state popular vote winner. Why on earth does it make sense for only nine people to cast the votes that matter on behalf of hundreds of thousands of Coloradans with high levels of civic engagement, or on behalf of 3 million individual voters? (Of course, I understand why we have the “number nine,” by adding our seven House seats to the two Senate seats.)

Most modern Coloradans have access to an embarrassment of information about those who would lead our nation, and almost all Coloradans of legal voting age have had at least some high school education if not a diploma and/or higher education. Presidential campaigns last for more than a year now, with so much information on TV or in print or in other media that many of us get election fatigue long before the second Tuesday in November. Yes, some people will still cast a ballot without serious study or thought, but the vast majority of us read or watch or listen to something substantive about the candidates and the issues over the course of a campaign. At bare minimum, I’ll argue that the need for a relatively tiny number of Electoral elites to make this decision for the unwashed masses is long past.

Was the Electoral College a Deal to Placate Slave States?: I won’t try to definitively answer this question here, because as mentioned before I wasn’t there during the Constitutional Convention, but readers can search the internet all day long and find countless stories suggesting that the interest of slave states was at least a factor in considerations surrounding the Electoral College.

This linked story from The Atlantic is just one among many, but it shows quite clearly how the Electoral College would have provided a favorable boost to electoral power in slave states. Here’s a key quote: “With about 93 percent of the country’s slaves toiling in just five southern states, that region was the undoubted beneficiary of the compromise, increasing the size of the South’s congressional delegation by 42 percent.”

In 1787, primarily only white male adult landowners had the right to vote. However, the new Constitution would at first allow states to count slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of allocating Congressional representation. You could consider this alone as “Exhibit A” as to how the Founders and the 1787 Constitution were in fact fallible, but I digress. Since the Electoral College gave Electoral votes to each state for the number of Congressional seats (plus the two Senators), slave states gained the benefit of the slave population in both House representation and the Electoral College – without actually allowing slaves to vote.

People will say the Electoral College was about giving small states a more favorable balance of power relative to large states. In recent decades, it actually has functioned in practice to give individual votes from people in small states more value, relative to Electoral votes, than votes from larger states, as mentioned earlier in the “vote weight” chart. But history does not suggest small states automatically gained advantages from the Electoral College in the early going. According to the New York Times piece linked here, “Eight of the first nine presidential elections were won by candidates who were plantation owners from Virginia, then America’s biggest state.” And in fact, Virginia was by far the largest state in the nation according to the 1790 census.

So, according to this story from history.com: “In 1787, roughly 40 percent of people living in the Southern states were black slaves, who couldn’t vote. James Madison from Virginia—where slaves accounted for 60 percent of the population—knew that either a direct presidential election, or one with electors divvied up according to free white residents only, wouldn’t fly in the South.”

Web-surfers can find a fair number of stories criticizing the idea of a link between the Electoral College and slave states as well, here’s a link to one of them from the New York Times, and I encourage people to do their own research on this one. But to me, it’s a point worth considering as we think about whether this system from the 1780s was some sort of eternally ultimate structure.

Did The Founders Trust Democracy?: This question probably deserves a mixed-bag answer, and a strong caveat that everyone should consider context when you read an isolated quote. I’d like to frame this section by posing another question – should we really be asking if the Founders were opposed to having “a democracy” as an overarching system since they established a republic, instead of asking if they trusted or disliked democracy as a practice? These are two very different questions, as I hope you’ll see in the next few paragraphs.

My blog post is mostly about electing a President, but I’d like to point out that the original U.S. Constitution included a House of Representatives which was to be elected by the people. This to me suggests that the Founders were at least not completely opposed to democracy in principle, since they established direct elections for one of their two powerful chambers of Congress in their original Constitution.

As we grew as a nation, so did the use of democracy in practice. U.S. Senators originally were appointed, not elected, but we’ve elected Senators through straight democracy since the 17th Amendment in 1913. We do straight democratic elections at a wide variety of levels, including for state Governors, statewide constitutional offices like Secretary of State, state legislators, school boards, and city or county officers. Suffrage today is basically universal among adults, regardless of race or sex, though of course there are still some unacceptable problems with voting rights in today’s United States. Also, even today’s Electoral College results are for the most part informed by straight democratic elections in all 50 states plus Washington DC, and the popular vote tallies in Congressional districts used in Maine and Nebraska.

We maintain some holdovers from older times in our political system of today that differ from straight popular democracy, including the caucus/assembly process. But Coloradans in 2020 know that we’ve changed our process of awarding major-party Presidential delegates from the caucus/assembly process to a Presidential primary with a popular vote – plus Colorado voters literally made this change via straight democracy by passing Proposition 107 on a 64-36% vote in 2016. Democracy marches on!

Records obviously show there was controversy at the original Constitutional Convention as to the system under which the President would be elected. Debate was not without concern about straight democracy to determine the holder of this office, but it was one of the ideas discussed, and two states actually cast votes in favor of an election “by the people.” And this Democratic writer will even link to this story from the Mises Institute, which claims that not all prominent early Americans despised democracy, including Patrick “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” Henry who was quoted in part as saying: “…What, Sir, is the genius of democracy?…whenever any Government shall be found inadequate, or contrary to those purposes, a majority of the community hath, an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to reform, alter, or abolish it, in such manner as shall be judged most conducive to the public weal.”

According to the American Bar Association, one reason democratic Presidential elections were not favored in 1787 was because “without sufficient information about candidates from outside their state, people might only vote for candidates from their own states or region, and no candidate would emerge with a majority vote, or the largest and most populous states would control elections.” Now, should lack of available information outside of one’s state of residence be any sort of concern whatsoever in the internet age?

Back to Federalist 68 – Hamilton wrote in favor of limiting “tumult and disorder,” and that convened Electors would have been able to make their choice in a location without being exposed to “the heats and ferments” of public passion. Even today, I have no doubt that some voters get swayed by “heats and ferments” such as awful commercials or interest group propaganda or raucous rallies or biased social media, and that some voters are drastically better-informed than others, and that some voters will make a completely uninformed or even mischievous choice for important offices. In fairness, democracy has its imperfections.

Other Founders, including James Madison, supplied quotes that will come in handy if a pundit wants to demonstrate that the Founders disliked democracy, like this one from Federalist 10: “Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” But if you can find time, take this quote in context while reading the entire Federalist 10, and I’ll recommend considering context if you come across any other cherry-picked quote along the way. First of all, Madison was comparing democracy to the small-r republican Constitution that Federalist Papers writers were trying to sell, and as I’ve written earlier we still have the basic framework of this republic and NPV would not change this framework. Secondly, for those who maintain that our nation is a democracy or even democratic republic, the democratic parts of our current system have actually been quite long-lived and for the most part seem to be gaining steam instead of dying violent deaths.

Musings from the Founders aside, what I think most important here is it’s beyond obvious that we’ve evolved since 1787 to accept and expect democratic elections every year and for many reasons – candidate races, social issues, taxation, and policy questions among them. I would call the prevailing but less-than-unanimous opposition to establishing a popular vote election for President in 1787 to be a fairly weak reason to oppose NPV in 2020, especially given our growth in using democratic elections since the distant past.

What is a State, Really?: Many people will argue that we should support the Electoral College because we’re a nation of states. I could find this easier to take to heart if there was any rational basis for the formation of our state boundaries, or if we could more easily modify states for practical reasons such as statistical fairness after they were formed. For starters, ponder the differences in size between some of the “original 13” states in the Northeast and newer Western states. Look at the map below and you can see the difference between Rhode Island, at 1,212 square miles, and Texas at 268,597 square miles. They’re both states even if Texas is 221 times bigger, they both get two Senators, and states get one Elector for each Senator. And remember, the two Senators per state account for nearly 20% of the total national Electoral College vote.

Western states in particular were created mostly in the mid-late 1800s, primarily as very large chunks of land, with small populations because of the difficulties of settling or living there. Boundaries for states west of the Mississippi are for the most part drawn with straight lines unless there’s a river or mountain range or ocean providing a natural boundary. Rectangular states like Wyoming and Colorado were simply drawn along parallels of latitude and longitude. And today, Colorado has nearly 10 times the population of Wyoming despite being fairly similar in size and topography and regional location – yet only 3 times the number of Electoral votes.

In general, I believe it’s fair and smart to look at outdated things of all types, and amend or change as necessary. But changing U.S. state boundaries, or adding new states, or combining existing states requires Congressional approval, and the U.S. has had absolutely zero changes in its state boundaries since 1959 when Alaska and Hawaii were admitted to the Union. We’d still be a United States and a republic if California’s 40 million people were split into perhaps six states, or if North and South Dakota’s respective populations of 760,000 and 892,000 were combined into one. And here’s an interesting piece showing how having a North and South Dakota instead of just “Dakota” was an intentional move to give Republicans four Senators instead of two, which of course also means two extra Electoral votes, while we still can’t even have North and South California or East and West Texas today.

I’ll maintain that today a lot of our numbers involving the states are far out of balance in relation to their impact on the business of governing a modern nation, and that is one of the top reasons I support having each American citizen’s vote count exactly the same as any other, regardless of state of residence.

What is California?: California is the poster child at the root of much debate about NPV and the Electoral College. It’s also a perfect illustration of the need to modify state boundaries time to time if we hope for a fairly-functioning republic. It became a state in 1850, carved out of formerly Mexican territory using primarily straight lines, and its first census showed a population of about 92,000 people (well, Native Americans didn’t count at all in this figure). Most of the U.S. population was east of the Mississippi, plus neither the airplane nor the automobile existed yet, so travel from eastern states to California was a difficult proposition. The “Golden Spike” of the transcontinental railroad didn’t get driven until 1869. Fast-forward along with all societal and technological advances to 2020, and California’s at about 40 million people – an increase of about 444 times over 170 years. Hamilton might have been a visionary but he didn’t predict California 2020.

In the debate over NPV, people will accurately point out that California’s got a gigantic urban population primarily along the southern coast. However, it’s also a diverse state – with rural towns, vast agricultural land, mountains, resorts, deserts, and even Republicans – Trump got about 31% of its vote in 2016. Ronald Reagan once governed California. Plus, I should mention Devin Nunes. Yet under the current Electoral College structure, California’s right-wing and right-wing rural votes have counted for absolutely nothing since 1992.

There have been more than 200 proposals to break California up into some number of states, but as mentioned above, it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon because of the need for Congressional approval.

Meanwhile, if California voters produce a large margin between candidates as they did by 4.3 million votes in 2016, this margin will count for nothing extra in the Electoral College, and runner-up votes like the nearly 4.5 million Trump vote tally in 2016 and minor-party or independent votes will remain completely valueless on the official scorecard. These are all totally real Americans, even if some folks think of Californians as oddballs or bug-eyed space creatures, and millions of them are essentially neutered in Presidential elections by an outdated Electoral system and a boundary devised in 1850 when there wasn’t even any Hollywood.

Optional Systems Aren’t Better: It’s true that the nation could find other choices than to switch from basically Electoral College “winner-take-all” systems to NPV. I just don’t think anything I’ve seen proposed looks better at this time, but let’s look at a few options.

• PER-DISTRICT PROBLEMS: Nebraska and Maine use systems awarding the 2 senatorial Electoral votes to the statewide popular vote winner, and then one Electoral vote to popular vote winners in each Congressional district. I wrote a guest opinion published in the Boulder Daily Camera last year in opposition to switching to per-district in Colorado, and my reasoning for opposition includes many of the basic concepts I’m sharing in the rest of this blog post.
  * Per-district is not mathematical. For example, Maine gave 75 percent of its Electoral votes to Clinton in 2016 despite a 48-45% popular vote tally. Had Colorado went per-district, the results would have been 66.6-33.3% Clinton despite only a 48-43% state popular vote.

* The number of voters in each district will vary, which means so will the value of an individual vote relative to an electoral vote. In 2018 (most recent numbers), Colorado Congressional District 2 turned out 430,765 voters, while District 5 had 322,716 – a nearly 35% greater turnout that would have earned CD-2 no additional Electoral value.
* The value of a Colorado Electoral vote would differ from districts in other states. Again, Colorado’s CD-2 at 430,765 individual votes would have counted the same as the 201,245 in the entire state of Wyoming, which has only one Congressional district, in 2018. This is one of the reasons why Trump would have won a nationwide per-district election 290-248 in 2016 despite losing the popular vote by 2.9 million votes.
* Campaigns would still focus on bigger cities, just on a different level. A per-district system would simply make Colorado campaigns focus on larger regional cities like Greeley or Grand Junction more than smaller rural towns in the same district.
* Like “safe states,” there would be “safe districts,” like there are now in the districts dominated by Boulder, Denver, or Colorado Springs. Campaigns don’t expend significant resources in safe states, and they wouldn’t spend as much in safe districts, although in fairness the Maine/Nebraska systems still give two Electoral votes to state winners – only 22.2% of the Electoral value for Colorado now or 20% if we grow to eight Congressional districts after the next census.
* The benefit of gerrymandering Congressional districts would become much greater if it could also produce dependable Electoral votes. Colorado has switched to an independent redistricting commission system so we shouldn’t need to worry about gerrymandering, but informed political geeks read often about gerrymandering elsewhere in the nation, and unless you’re a Political Pollyanna you’d better believe it would be a consideration if partisans had the power to make it happen.

• PROPORTIONAL ALLOCATION NO BETTER: Simply taking the state popular vote and dividing it to allocate Electoral votes suffers from one main problem – rounding. Most states don’t have that many Electoral votes, say between the three all small states get and Colorado’s nine. This means each Electoral vote would equal 33.3% of the total in the smallest states, so a 50.1% popular vote showing would be rounded up to 66.6% in allocating Electors. In Colorado, each Electoral vote would equal 11.1%, so a 50.1% popular vote showing would be worth 55.5% in the Electoral College. Suffice it to say that it’s an infinitely more accurate reflection of the will of the voters to – just count the votes.
• RANKED CHOICE VOTING, LATER PLEASE: I often see comments about NPV along the lines of “we should just go to Ranked Choice Voting,” but there’s one major reason I can’t agree. RCV won’t by itself solve the main problem we have with current use of the Electoral College, which is the vast disparity between the power of individual votes relative to Electoral votes between states. It would take a Constitutional amendment or an…interstate compact…to make RCV results free of this disparity, with the final and official results not filtered through our current 1787 structure. RCV seems to have a lot of momentum, it’s basically a popular vote with more nuance, it might create or fit into a new system at some point, but as of early 2020 no state is using it for their Presidential general election. Meanwhile, NPV is fairly close to ready to go since it’s been approved in 15 states plus Washington DC, for a total of 196 Electoral votes out of the 270 necessary for adoption. I actually see some of the good points of RCV, several states will use it in 2020 primaries, and it might be a great solution for primaries with gigantic candidate fields like the Republicans in 2016 and Democrats in 2020. But since Presidential general elections have to work within the Electoral College, NPV trumps RCV for me in importance by miles when it comes to what we need to implement first.

Big States Not the Only Stakes: You’ll hear that under NPV big states will decide the election and everyone else will be so much chopped liver, but I’ll say please don’t buy the messaging too easily and look closely at the actual numbers.

Back to California, the poster child and the prophet on the burning shore – its 55 Electoral votes are about 10.2% of the nation’s 538 total Electoral votes, by far the largest numbers in the nation. It also has cities weighing in at second, eighth, tenth, and 15th in the nation for population. These cities, however, have far greater power in California’s statewide popular vote election than in a nationwide election because the U.S. voter pool is vastly bigger than the state of California. In a winner-take-all system, California’s big cities make Dems taking all 55 Electoral votes an almost-certainty right now.

But in 2016, Clinton voters in California made up only about 6.4% of the national popular vote, while all voters in California weighed in at about 10.4% of the national popular vote. If these raw numbers and political balances stay basically similar into the future, California’s Democratic/liberal individual voters would actually have far less impact on national election results under NPV than the nearly automatic 10.2% of the Electoral College.

Plus, by adding up all of Clinton’s 2016 votes from the largest state on down, you’ll find that it took until the 38th state before Clinton had more votes than Trump’s eventual total – and states just get progressively smaller after 38th, in some cases with margins between Trump and Clinton in just the thousands or tens of thousands. Clinton couldn’t have come close under NPV to winning with California’s 6.4%, plus New York’s 3.3%, plus Chicago, as some operatives will try to message. In fact, she never even got to 50% in the 2016 national popular vote, thanks in part to the existence of multiple candidates.

Since conservative NPV opponents will certainly focus messaging on California and New York because they’re currently Democratic strongholds, let’s remember that Florida and Texas, states Trump won, were numbers two and three in terms of 2016 popular votes cast, with New York at number four. In fact, Trump won seven of the 10 largest states in terms of voter turnout, yet lost the national popular vote. Please look at the totality of our large nation, and don’t buy the inevitable fearmongering over the California bogeyman.

What Would It Take To Win?: NPV would undoubtedly change campaign strategy, and it might actually be better for those who believe other parts of the nation beyond battleground states should get some attention. First, it would almost by definition become worthwhile for a candidate to campaign in states in which they know they’re going to lose, or even lose fairly badly. Trump himself even claimed that he would have campaigned differently under a popular vote system. Certainly his 4.5 million vote total in California could have been somewhat larger with a stronger state campaign, as could have Clinton’s 3.8 million in Texas.

I might agree that NPV will lead campaigns to devote resources toward big cities or metro areas – though that certainly happens under the current system as well – but it would still leave a pretty large majority of states with at least one city or more in the game. As a campaign guy, I’d have a presence in all the typical big cities/metros with pro sports teams and/or major airports (there’s a city like this in many of our larger states); plus larger regional cities like Omaha, Des Moines, Lexington, Boise, Birmingham, or Albuquerque; plus mid-sized college towns like Eugene or Fargo (both bigger than Boulder). Outside the contiguous 48 states, Anchorage, Alaska has a population of about 297,000, and Honolulu, Hawaii is at about 352,000. Today, 45 states plus Washington D.C. have at least one city (or district) of 100,000 or larger.

A “campaign presence,” of course, does not necessarily mean the major-party candidates will have time or resources to do live rallies. But it should probably mean campaign headquarters, staff and/or volunteers, a ground game, and money to spend on local ad buys or mailers or targeted digital marketing. If the eventual results are going to be within single digits percentage-wise, it would be foolhardy at monumental levels to simply hunker down in southern California and New York City, or for that matter Ft. Worth, Oklahoma City, and Jacksonville.

It’s probably true that candidates won’t devote resources to certain areas under NPV, but for the most part they’re not doing it under the Electoral College either. I’ll tell anyone who cares to listen to Captain Obvious right now that Wyoming will go red in 2020, which means the three Electoral votes are virtually assured and it’s not worth any Presidential candidate’s time or money to try to make a major push there – and I mean anywhere in the entire state. But under NPV, it might be worth fighting for popular votes by running a low-budget ground game in Cheyenne, Laramie, and several more of Wyoming’s largest cities. It might not amount to much, but it also wouldn’t be the zero Electoral votes that are at play right now, and similar efforts in other smaller states might add up to make a difference if there’s a tight national election.

Colorado may or may not continue to grow toward becoming a reliably blue state. But as it stands, Denver and Colorado’s northern Front Range, including Boulder, leans blue and makes up the largest population base in the state, much bigger than all other major regions in the state although predominantly-red Douglas and El Paso counties are large and growing. Obviously, Presidential campaigns know this and focus resources appropriately. The voting population in Denver and the northern Front Range basically make smaller population centers like Greeley or Grand Junction far less important in statewide winner-take-all elections.

But under NPV, runner-up candidate votes from, say, dependably red and mid-sized Grand Junction would count in the nationwide tally, instead of as contributing to absolute zero in Electoral votes if Colorado stays “blue.” Some version of the same would be true in other states – for example, conservative votes from rural Illinois or New York would count for something despite dependable big blue numbers coming from the Windy City and the Big Apple. The goal would no longer be “carrying a state,” but reaching as many people as possible even if winning the state isn’t likely.

The Faithless Elector: Real Ambivalence: People will tell you that the Electoral College empowers Electors to vote for a candidate on principle, regardless of a state’s popular vote, which might be a republic-saver if the peoples’ choice is actually dangerous or incompetent. The problem with this minimally-partially technically true statement is that in practice today, 48 states plus Washington DC almost always award all of their Electoral votes to the state’s popular vote winner, and about 30 states including Colorado have requirements in state law. Colorado’s CRS 1-4-304 (5) flat-out says all electors “shall vote for the presidential candidate and, by separate ballot, vice-presidential candidate who received the highest number of votes at the preceding general election in this state.”

The 2016 election to a certain extent re-awakened some peoples’ interest in how Electors could buck actual election results – as an act of altruism – in case of problems. A group of what some might call “faithless Electors” acted in 2016 as “Hamilton Electors,” and tried to find ways to keep Trump from taking office. Initially, Colorado Hamilton Elector Micheal Baca voted for John Kasich and not the state’s winner Clinton, but Baca was removed as an Elector and replaced due to Colorado state law. The U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals later ruled that this removal and nullification of Baca’s vote was unconstitutional, and the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to consider the Appeals ruling. Neither the 10th Circuit ruling nor prior case law seem to me to suggest that states can’t require Electors to pledge that they’ll vote for the state’s popular vote winner prior to their appointment, but the Supreme Court decision might determine whether states can remove Electors and nullify their votes if they choose to go back on their pledge. Of course, SCOTUS gonna SCOTUS, and we might know its ruling plus majority and possible minority opinions by late April.

UPDATE: SCOTUS ultimately ruled that faithless elector laws are constitutional.

The faithless elector consideration is interesting to me, and I could imagine that it could in super-rare circumstances be used beneficially as sort of a “nuclear option” in case of real trouble. I also completely believe the 2016 Hamilton Electors acted with good intentions. However, Electors have never staved off an emergency throughout U.S. history, and winner-take-all laws and long-standing expectations make reversing an election through the Electoral College very difficult. Plus, the possibility of the faithless elector has some serious potential down sides in my opinion. For starters, about 136 million Americans cast votes in 2016, and if you divide this by the 538 Electors, you get about 254,032 popular votes per Elector nationwide, or about 309,000 in Colorado 2016. That’s extremely disproportionate power for one person, especially if they vote based on their own opinion and not according to the voters’ will. And in the case of the Maine/Nebraska per-district system, it’s imaginable that a faithless Elector could in effect completely overturn the popular election results for a given district (though at least Nebraska law requires at-large and district electors to honor popular vote results)!

It’s not impossible to imagine an Elector hiding true intentions under the radar – perhaps even being under the influence of a foreign power or hostile political machine – in which case one person might cast a vote completely contrary to the will or even best interests of the people. I could imagine an Elector being tempted with bribes or facing threats to vote a certain way, and this Electoral vote carries vastly more weight than an individual vote. In a close Electoral College situation, it could be too easy for an Elector or a small faction to vote against the expectations of their state(s) and swing the entire election – and partisans might love or hate this possibility only depending on who wins!

On a personal level as an occasional campaign guy, I can’t help being troubled to the core about one aspect of the potential power of an Elector going rogue. Modern presidential campaigns now last for more than a year and for certain candidates practically closer to two or more. Candidates travel across the country; staffers and supporters work their tails off; individuals give monetary donations and volunteer-hours; and candidates attend countless debates and meet the press. It’s a grueling process for candidates and supporters alike, yet come November one person may literally have the power to cast a vote, perhaps with a force equal to 254,032 or 309,000 individual voters, for a candidate who didn’t earn statistical support from voters – or possibly didn’t even run for President.

The 2016 election produced faithless elector votes for Colin Powell, Faith Spotted Eagle, John Kasich, Bernie Sanders, and Ron Paul – and none of these actions rose to the level of saving the republic. But NPV won’t actually end the Electoral College, so Electors would still be able to make their own choices where it’s legal (and the Supreme Court might make it legal everywhere, or not). I don’t have any reason to believe there would be systemic reasons why faithless electors would pose a threat to outcomes under NPV more or less than they already do under our current system, and faithless elector votes throughout history have been quite rare. As it stands, I’ll at least maintain there’s no need to cling to our current system solely for the rights of Electors to vote their conscience.

Voting Rights, and Who Counts the Votes?: We have some real problems today in the U.S. with alleged voter suppression, differences in state voting laws, and perhaps trustworthiness of certain elections personnel, officials, or physical systems. To me, these things are more of a concern under our current system than they would be under NPV, since relatively small quantities of suppressed voters or dishonest/incompetent clerking would be more likely to swing a state election (and probably 100% of a state’s Electoral vote) than a nationwide election involving, say, 150 million voters.

In 2020 and beyond, the U.S. needs to address voting rights and electoral mischief, no matter the system we use to elect a President. We have the technology to calculate “pi” to something like 31.4 trillion digits (this figure might already be outdated depending on when you read this), and we ought to find the focus to apply some of these technological advances – plus our best legal work on voting rights, plus our most righteous levels of morality – toward a nationwide Presidential election system worthy of what we hope to call the world’s leading democracy, even if anyone feels better saying we’re a republic. For me, the winner of the national popular vote ought to win the Presidency, and I hope you’ll join me in voting to support Colorado’s membership in the NVPIC!

CONCLUSION

I hope I’ve presented a whole bunch of reasons why NPV would be a better, fairer system for electing a President in 2020 or beyond than our antiquated Electoral College system. But for those wanting more information, check out the National Popular Vote website, and in particular its page called “Answering Myths” since you’ll be fed a bunch of these myths during the upcoming campaign. Or, since we’ll vote on a Colorado ballot measure in 2020, try the Colorado NPV page for more localized info.

One way or another, protecting Colorado’s status in the NPVIC will not be a slam-dunk. There’s a ton of misinformation going around already, and you can be certain there will be big money in the game and bad ads or opinion pieces spreading falsehoods during the campaign. Please don’t be silent here, talk to your friends and colleagues, make sure you vote, and let’s keep moving toward the better, fairer, Presidential election system we deserve in these modern times.