Iowa Considering National Popular Vote Legislation

by Trish Nelson

I'm not so sure how I feel about the National Popular Vote bill (SSB 1128) currently being discussed in the Iowa legislature. According to the February 11 Des Moines Register, Iowa Bill Would Bypass Electoral College, this idea is gaining some traction.  John Deeth's blog reports the bill is moving forward on an 8-7 Senate committee vote, with the GOP and two Democrats (Wally Horn and Dennis Black) in opposition.  For arguments on both sides, you can check out Opposingviews.com and Nationalpopularvote.com.

The gist of it is this:  When the bill is enacted in a group of states possessing 270 or more electoral votes, all of the electoral votes from those states would be awarded, as a bloc, to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC). 

Obviously, whoever gets the most votes should win the election, but I wonder whether this particular scheme is going to help our election system achieve more fairness, or possibly make things worse.  The idea to “get around” the Constitution by entering into an agreement with other states to give our votes to the popular vote winner is alarming at several levels, one being that it seems to set up a situation where a
candidate could win the popular vote in Iowa, but all of Iowa's
electoral votes could go to a candidate we did not as a state vote for, based on the
agreement.  Someone talk me down on this; how does this make me feel like my vote will count more?  Why again do we need this?

There have been arguably four times in our nation's history that there was a discrepancy between the electoral college count and the popular vote count.  But setting aside for the moment Bush v. Gore 2000, the last time this happened was back in 1888.  Prior to that, 1876 and 1824.

Personally, I like the idea of my vote going to a collective vote based on my state's particular interests.  Sometimes my side wins, sometimes not, but a national popular vote would seem to render my single vote less meaningful. Instead of being one voice in roughly a million and a half,  helping my candidate win my state, in a national popular vote system, my voice becomes only one of 220 million.  This year, my candidate won.  Because of the electoral college system, my vote became 7 votes of 538. I like that ratio much better.   It seems to me in a national popular vote system, the states lose, because the particular interests of each state that are reflected by that state's vote totals are not considered collectively – we all would just be casting one individual vote in one big national lottery. 

An argument for the national popular vote is that some states are irrelevant because they are not swing states.  They say that no one campaigns in the “decided” states. To those states that feel irrelevant because they are already “decided” I would suggest that this has nothing to do with the electoral college system and that they need to get to work. Iowa looked pretty solidly Republican for a while, but that has changed. It is much easier to organize for change on the state level than on the national level.  And Democrats, after adopting Howard Dean's 50-state strategy, have made inroads into previously “decided” states.  With a national popular vote system, the small states will become the irrelevant states, and there's nothing you can do about that, if you live in one of those states (which includes Iowa).  I don't buy the argument that smaller states collectively would have more influence with a national popular vote system.  I think the opposite is true. 

Back to 2000.  In considering the National Popular Vote legislation, most people are thinking of Bush v. Gore 2000, where Al Gore lost the election even though he had more votes.  While on the surface it seems like a no-brainer to blame the electoral college system for the fact that we got Bush for eight years instead of Al Gore, let us not forget one small detail.  

The only reason there was a discrepancy in 2000 between the  popular vote and the electoral college count was because the election was STOLEN in Florida.  Or, if you don't like the word STOLEN, Bush was appointed by the Supreme Court after stopping the recount of Florida.  Had that election not been stolen, the popular and electoral vote would have both been in Gore's favor.  So, in my view, that election simply does not count as an argument for a national popular vote. But it does raise other election integrity issues that I think are much more pressing.

Close state elections have been touted as another argument why we need to go to a national popular vote, the logic being that a few votes one way or another in a state should not decide a national election.  I think that the closeness of these elections has to do with living in the age of Karl Rove and black box voting (touch-screen machines), which in my view has been the life support of the GOP in recent years, and the only reason (outside of talk radio and FOX News) they have been in the game at all in the last two election cycles.  

It seems to me a simple “add up the total number” system would create campaign chaos in an otherwise orderly (albeit somewhat flawed) state-by-state election system.   I think that the idea that going to national popular vote would correct the inevitable unfairnesses in our elections is simplistic and we need to think through what the long-term ramifications of this would be before jumping on a bandwagon for something just because it sounds like a good idea.     

This brings me to my last point which is, I wonder if this is a convenient distraction from the politically tougher issue of how to pass campaign finance reform and clean election legislation (VOICE).  It is easy and popular,  hence politically safe to say, shouldn't the one with the most votes win?  Who could disagree with that?  

I think our legislators need to consider carefully the bill's possible unintended consequences to our election system BEFORE signing it into Iowa law.