I’d like to respond to letter writer Karen Rubin regarding the Electoral College and National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. It’s all about how America is structured and organized.
While America conducts all elections via a “one-person/one vote” process, this is not a pure democracy, but a constitutional republic organized around a federation of sovereign states. POTUS stands for “President of the United States,” i.e., the executive of the federation. Successful presidential candidates gain support from multiple regions of the country.
The makeup of the U.S. Senate is equal for all states, to make clear that every state has a distinct voice in governance. This principle carries over to the rare occasion of the House of Representatives needing to break a presidential election tie.
In that event, each state congressional delegation gets one vote only. As for the (tired) example of Wyoming vs California: Wyoming has 3 presidential electors; California has 54, more than the 14 smallest states combined.
The Electoral College is detailed in the Constitution itself, Article II, Section 1, and later in the 12th Amendment. It addresses only presidential elections because the president is our only elected officer to represent the country as a whole.
We don’t have a ‘peoples’ president.’ The Electoral College is part of an elegant election infrastructure intended to secure every state a distinct place at the table, and to erect barriers to collusion by a majority, or undue influence from a single region of the country.
The Electoral College erects a legal wall around every state so that voting irregularities in one state do not pollute the vote in any other state.
In New York, it took NPV 10 years to pass the Legislature. In the seven years since the Compact has received much scrutiny.
For example, the New York State Constitution, Article II, Section 1, stipulates that citizens are entitled to vote “…provided that such citizen is eighteen years of age or over and shall have been a resident of this state, and of the county, city, or village for thirty days next preceding an election.”
The problem is, if the Compact ever takes effect, New York’s electors will be handed over to the winner of the national vote, giving control to millions who have never set foot in the state of New York, violating your residency requirements.
Today the 16 Compact signatories are all trifecta blue states, those with one party controlling the Governor’s office and both chambers of the legislature. All told 35 states have voted it down, including most of “flyover country.”
Most major democratic nations in fact also use indirect election systems to choose their head of state. In contrast, according to Wikipedia, here is the list of countries who elect their Chief Executive directly by national vote: Angola, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Cameroon, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, The Gambia, Honduras, Iceland, Kiribati, Malawi, Mexico, Nicaragua, Palestine, Panama, Paraguay, Philippines, Rwanda, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Tanzania and Venezuela. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting.
Of this list, 11 have populations under 10 million. The remaining are either monolithic, unstable, and/or dictatorships. This is NOT where America belongs.
A standard NPVIC claim is that under the Compact “every vote is of equal value in our process.” The question is, equal to what? In 2020 a New Yorker’s vote for President was 1 in 8.6 million. Under NPVIC, it would have been 1 in 158 million. So how exactly is it that NPVIC would make the citizens of New York “more equal” in ANY way that matters?
Roberta Schlechter
Portland, Ore.
The author of this piece is speaking from pure conceit:
“While America conducts all elections via a “one-person/one vote” process, this is not a pure democracy, but a constitutional republic organized around a federation of sovereign states.”
This is a baseless message board trope repeated billions of times, and it lacks context or reality.
“The problem is, if the Compact ever takes effect, New York’s electors will be handed over to the winner of the national vote, giving control to millions who have never set foot in the state of New York, violating your residency requirements.”
False on it’s face, but while the Compact is imperfect, ridding ourselves of the Electoral College is the reason this movement has taken place. Nevertheless, it’s an improvement over what we have now.
Aside from that, north of Westchester, most voters are Republicans, and the Congressional make up of the area shows it. Even in California, once outside of L.A. County, a wide swath of the state is reliably Republican. Again, the message board twaddle that “two states” will rule the country is a falsehood. Given that both states generate nearly half of the GDP in this country, maybe they SHOULD.
“We don’t have a ‘peoples’ president.’ The Electoral College is part of an elegant election infrastructure intended to secure every state a distinct place at the table, and to erect barriers to collusion by a majority, or undue influence from a single region of the country.”
Which is a function performed by the Legislative Branch. More on this later. “Elegant?” Really?
The problem with the defenders of the current system is that their argument is merely self serving, and not just. So they come up with all kinds of facile excuses to justify a system that was never allowed to scale up to the nation we have NOW, instead of the way it was.
This suits them fine.
Worse still, is the Senate: 51 Senators represent about 20% of the electorate, and that’s how we wound up with the most bizarre slate of Supreme Court Justices since Reconstruction. There are states with fewer residents than Nassau County that have oversized representation well beyond what they deserve. Millions of voters are disenfranchised, and if Ms. Schlecter lives under the conceit the Founders would have been remotely happy with the current outcome, we would have stayed part of the British Empire.
Ideally, the Senate should be abolished, the Electoral College should be scrapped, the House should be expanded, and the right of vast stretches of barren land to pre-empt the right of suffrage, which is every American’s entitlement, should end.
And none of this will, because the minority won’t act out of fairness or altruism. They’re content to stick it to the rest of us, even if it makes the country incapable of consensus or the ability to be self-governed.
And so, you’ll be treated to letters like this. Probably forever.