Not What It’s Cracked Up to Be

“National Popular Vote” isn’t what it’s cracked up to be:

It’s bad for Alaska, bad for the Nation

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I’m barely (by one year!) old enough to remember when The Last Frontier became America’s 49th state. It was a big deal. Alaska is still a big deal in a class by itself. Our state ratified the Constitution in 1959, and every day since, the electoral college safeguarded our unique voice and influence in presidential elections. It secures our borders against vote spillover and election irregularities from anywhere else.

Until 2006 states could take this for granted. But then some California bottomless pockets began pushing something they call the “National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.” It’s embodied in SB61, now in the Senate Judiciary Committee. I hope they will not advance the bill. Permit me to explain.

What exactly is NPV?

A state entering the National Popular Vote (NPV) interstate compact agrees to award all their electoral votes to whichever presidential ticket wins the nationwide popular vote in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. It takes 270 electoral votes to win.

First, let’s ascend 30,000 feet and view the big picture. Then will zoom in on what it would mean for Alaska. Then we’ll scan around to point out a few other general problems with the scheme.

The big picture: not advisable for US

The promoters of the NPV have a well-honed spiel and are making plenty of money while selling their wares, but to this day, NPV has NO HOME in any major country.

National votes for Chief Executive happen in: 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.  

Of this list, 11 countries have populations under 10M. The remaining are either monolithic, unstable, and/or dictatorships. None are regarded as America is by the rest of the free world. By any measure, this is not who we are.

A colleague observes: “A national popular vote discounts the individual. This is where the weird math comes in; if you dilute the whole and do not account for the small, your results become skewed. This is how Third World dictators hold ‘NATIONAL’ elections and always win.”

Zoom in: bad for Alaska

The NPV would be especially unfair for Alaska.  It makes voters unequal across the country, but the promoters sell their idea by couching it in terms of the political campaign industry.  They intentionally blur and confuse campaigning with the actual election and the governing.

Elections are so much more than a short-term political blitz campaign, but the NPV movement lures supporters by convincing them if their state enters the compact, the presidential candidates will be more likely to visit their states.

Think about that for a minute though. Wouldn’t a candidate actually be more likely to not campaign in-person in our small-population state under this NPV system as their focus would be winning the popular vote nationwide – and to do that, would they not need to hang out in high-population areas?

The presidential candidates would devote their time to large urban areas in the lower 48 not to Alaska, not to other rural states, and not to areas of states sparsely populated. The candidates would focus on the two coasts and sprinkle in a few big cities in between as they’d jet back and forth between the oceans: Chicago, Atlanta, Denver, etc.

Let’s acknowledge too that more than once, the federal government has stuck its nose pretty deep into Alaska’s business. Further erosion of state sovereignty and rendering Alaska defenseless will not sit well with most Alaskans.

It’s important to recognize that adopting an NPV system would not just be tweaking our presidential election process, it would destroy a preeminent part of the essential state/federal balance designed to allow maximum self-governance at the state and local levels. In my opinion, NPV would transfer the control of Alaska’s three votes afforded to us by the electoral college for president into the hands of people who are not from Alaska.

A standard NPV claim is that under the compact, “Every vote is of equal value in our process.”  Is that true? No, it is absolutely not true. Case in point: in 2020, an Alaskan citizen’s vote for president was 1 in 359,530. Under NPV, it would have been 1 in 158 million.

Obviously, I support the continuation of the electoral college determining the presidential race results. It was designed by our framers to ensure the rural areas and states with small populations have a fair say in our presidential elections. (This is similar to the balance created by having the US Senate and the US House – whereas the House membership is based on population and the Senate membership is on equal footing among the 50 states, each with the same weight of two votes.)

As previously discussed, moving to a national popular vote (NPV) model would result in a handful of large urban areas in the country determining who our president is every four years – and Alaska would be irrelevant under such a system.

Lest I’ve not quite convinced you yet that NPV is a bad idea, let’s scan a few other looming problems with NPV.

Scan the landscape: constitutional problems

To refresh your memory from your high school civic lessons: established in Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution, the electoral college is the formal body that elects the president and vice president of the United States. The number of electors in any state is equal to the number of U.S. senators and representatives that the state has in Congress. The electoral college consists of 538 electors. A majority of 270 electoral votes is required to elect the president.

NPV is a scheme that would render the electoral college and state borders as mere props because the states in the compact would hand over all their elector votes to the national winner, regardless of how the voters in their own state voted. Forget the villages, towns, cities, community members, and local leaders. Their vote and voice would be swept away.

This likely violates the Constitution in three ways: 1) it creates a second voting basis for the compact states (a ‘national popular vote tally’); 2) it creates inequality among the voters and among the states; and 3) it makes noncompact states irrelevant in the process. No longer will it matter if a legislature in a non-NPV compact state changes the way it chooses electors, the compact states will have all the power to control how the president is elected, a constitutional provision that is denied to the non-compact states.

Note the compact would include 21-22 states while 28-29 states would not be in it. Do we really want less than half the states determining our nation’s leaders every four years and cutting out more than half the states from a final say in the process?

If the NPV effort is successful (let’s intensely hope it is not), litigation is inevitable. The surest way to have the Supreme Court of the United States choose all future presidents is to enact this NPV compact scheme.

One final scan follows that should help you understand that Alaska’s three electoral votes are more pivotal than you realize, and that we need to protect them.

Scan a little history: Small state – big difference

Do you recall the election that ultimately had to be decided by the US Supreme Court in a lawsuit titled George Bush vs. Albert Gore? Which state do you think was the most pivotal in that election? Almost everyone says, “Florida.” It wasn’t! It was West Virginia. Yes, the low-populated, rural state of West Virginia proved to be the critical difference in that election.

West Virginia has four (4) Electoral Votes.  It had safely voted for Democrats for many decades.  But George Bush believed that there was one major issue where he was more in sync with the state and people of West Virginia than his opponent and one that left his opponent more vulnerable: coal.  He just needed the time to talk with them and earn their trust.  His advisors had told him he was wasting time and money going to that area,  but eventually, he changed their minds.

Bush made several visits to West Virginia before, during, and after the campaign to discuss his vision and policy for US energy and the place coal had in it. Meanwhile, Al Gore knew, or at least thought, he had West Virginia comfortably locked up and never campaigned there.

When the Bush v Gore lawsuit in Florida was settled, Bush was declared the winner by a vote of 271-266.  However, had Bush not worked on building multi-state coalitions around the energy issue in that election, he would not have carried West Virginia and would have lost to Al Gore 267-270.

A few electoral college votes can be very pivotal. Alaska needs to defend and maintain the electoral college system and shoot down the NPV scheme.

 

Final thoughts:

Since 2007 when the NPV compact passed in Maryland, it has been defeated at least once in 35 states. In 188 recorded legislative attempts, NPV bills have a win-loss record of 16-172. Most lawmakers refuse to outsource their voters.

Know that NPV backers have nabbed many of the ‘low hanging fruit’ states for a total of 195 electoral votes since their effort began (they need 270 total). Meanwhile, states in flyover country consistently say no to this scheme, even though like Alaska, these are the states NPV claims the electoral college leaves behind. Even though NPV promoters will continue to weave their magical fairy tale, you now know it is all an illusion, an illusion that is bad for our nation and bad for Alaska.