Eratosphere - Electoral College, thread 2

I attended an interesting League of Women Voters event today in which two speakers said different things relevant to a previous thread here.

The first speaker said that getting rid of the Electoral College system for electing U.S. presidents will never happen, because doing so would require an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and amendments to the U.S. Constitution must be ratified by 3/4 of the states (with one vote per state). Because too many small states mistakenly believe that they enjoy special benefits because they have an outsized voice in presidential elections (despite actually being ignored by the candidates, who only focus on swing states), we could never get 3/4 of the states to agree to get rid of the Electoral College system that gives them that outsized voice. End of story.

The second speaker said that yes, it's true that we can never get rid of the Electoral College system, for the reasons the first speaker stated. But no, that's not the end of the story!

We can use the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact to achieve basically the same thing, without requiring a constitutional amendment, and thus without requiring the cooperation of 3/4 of the states.

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is an agreement among several states to award all their Electoral College votes to the winner of the national popular vote. States must pass the necessary legislation first, in order to sign on.

The reason that we haven't seen things change yet is that that, under the terms of the compact, these states' legislation is drafted in such a way that it will ONLY kick in after the critical mass of Electoral College votes has been reached. In other words, the switch will only be made when there are enough participating states to determine the outcome of the presidential election their way--according to the national popular vote--regardless of how the non-participating states award their own Electoral College votes.

Again, the current signatory states have already passed the necessary legislation to instruct their electors to vote for the winner of the popular vote under the terms of the compact, but this legislation won't take effect until critical mass of other signatories is reached.

Listed in the order of the Electoral College votes (EV) they wield, these states are:

California--55 EV--adopted the compact August 8, 2011
New York--29 EV--April 15, 2014
Illinois--20 EV--April 7, 2008
New Jersey--14 EV--January 13, 2008
Washington--12 EV--April 28, 2009
Massachusetts--11 EV--August 4, 2010
Maryland--10 EV--April 10, 2007
Hawaii--4 EV--May 1, 2008
Rhode Island--4 EV--July 12, 2013
District of Columbia--3 EV--December 7, 2010
Vermont--3 EV--April 22, 2011

The legislatures of Michigan (16 EV) and Pennsylvania (20 EV) have currently-pending legislation on this; I don't know the committee status and such, but the year's almost over, so if they're going to pass it they need to get a move on.

You can check the Wikipedia table here to see the history of bills relating to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact in your own state. Note that several non-participating states have come very close to passing it, and several participating states needed several tries before success.

With 165 Electoral College votes currently committed to the compact, only 105 more are needed for the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact to take effect. So we're already 61.1% of the way to awarding future presidencies to the winner of the popular vote. This is doable by 2020, people.

And getting this done before 2020 is a good idea for more than one reason. Remember, that's the year of the next census, which will change the number of Electoral College votes awarded to each state (along with the critical mass needed to trigger the provisions of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact).

If you care about changing the Electoral College system so that it corresponds with the popular vote, and you live in a state whose legislature hasn't yet signed on, please research the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and try to help move things along. I found the videos at that site very interesting.

Your local chapter of the League of Women Voters (which, by the way, offers full membership to both men and women, but retains the name because it grew out of the women's suffrage movement) would be a good place to start. They may already have a committee working on this, and can put you to work immediately.