@trinsec @peterdrake not quite. It's a legal agreement between states to work together to circumvent the electoral college to essentially implement a popular vote (see this video for more info: https://youtu.be/tUX-frlNBJY)

@sojournTime
Thanks for the video, but it's too fast-paced for me. I'm not too familiar enough with US election style to understand this video. Is there some other source that's got... less moving pictures? ;)

@peterdrake

@trinsec @peterdrake the Wikipedia page is informative, though a little verbose:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact?wprov=sfla1

@trinsec @sojournTime Short story (leaving out a few details):

Each state is worth a certain number of "electoral votes". The candidate who wins the most electoral votes becomes President.

Within each state, whoever gets the most votes gets ALL of the electoral votes. So, for example, if 51% of the people in Florida vote for you, you get all of Florida's electoral votes.

One consequence is that all of the political power goes to "swing states" that might go to either party in a given election. Everyone knows that California will go to the Democrats and Texas will go to the Republicans, so they get almost no campaign visits. Ohio, on the other hand, might go either way, so a LOT of campaigning happens there.

(An additional problem is that the number of electoral votes per state is not proportional to the state's population. This is a consequence of consolations made to slavers when the country was founded.)

The National Popular Vote Compact effectively ends this process and gives the Presidency to the candidate who gets the most votes.

@peterdrake

According to the US Constitution, states can't enter into a compact without the consent of the US Congress and Congress has not given their consent. So this compact is not legal.

Even if they got enough states, they'd have to go back to Congress to first get permission, then go through the whole process again because Congress can't enact any ex post facto law. It would also require approval by the President (or 2/3 of Congress if vetoed), and also require approval by the Supreme Court.

I don't know why they are bothering with all of this when they know that it is not legal.

Also, any state could back out at any time if they wanted to, which kind of defeats the whole purpose.

@trinsec @sojournTime

@trinsec
To offer a bit more background: the US Constitution was written in the late 1700s. It could take weeks to communicate down the length of the country, which presented challenges we don't see today - organising a single nationwide vote of the general public was logistically impractical. So the framers laid out a multi-step process:
1. The general public casts their votes for Electors
2. Electors meet at the state capital to cast their votes for President
3. Each state sends its Electors' totals to Congress, who adds them up and determines the winner.

Conventional campaigning is about convincing people to vote a certain way at step 1, a "faithless Elector" who votes for someone other than his pledged candidate would do so at step 2, and the events of 6 January a couple years ago were an attempt to influence Congress's determination of the winner in step 3.

Each state has a number of Electors equal to the total number of its Representatives (proportional to population) and Senators (two per state regardless of size), so the framers might have expected the states to use the existing ridings with a couple at-large statewide races for the two Electors corresponding to the Senators, but this isn't codified and the details are left to the states. Two small states still do things this way, but most now award the whole slate of Electors to the candidate with the plurality at the state level.

There's some disagreement as to why most states are winner-take-all. I take the view that it's self-interest: for swing states, this increases the payoff for winning and means candidates spend more effort and money to win its citizens' approval; for stronghold states it means the dominant party assures itself of that many more Electors on its side. But there are others who see this as a purposeful choice by the framers to avoid mob rule, and see this as an invention of great wisdom (or even Divine inspiration) on their part.

Now that we have the ability to conduct a single nationwide election, it would make a certain amount of sense to implement this - but amending the Constitution is really hard. There's a sizable cohort of Americans who revere the framers as religious prophets and consider any suggestion of modifying their writings akin to sacrilege. On top of that, the current system gives a small but durable advantage to less-populous states, who would actively oppose any attempt to weaken their position.

So instead the workaround is that if a group of states which collectively comprise more than half the Electoral College all sign onto this compact, they'll each award their slates to whichever candidate wins the *national* rather than statewide vote, guaranteeing him a majority. As @Pat points out, the legality of the plan to have Congress approve the compact after the states agree is unclear, and circumventing the normal amendment process this way is controversial.

@peterdrake @sojournTime

Thank you, @khird, for the background. I think a lot of people who take a position on this issue really don’t understand the history of how the electoral college came to be and the reasons for it.

A couple more points to add to what you’ve contributed...

>”organising a single nationwide vote of the general public was logistically impractical.”

It was more than just logistics. At the founding, the states were 13 separate, individual countries. Over time, those separate countries developed a closer and closer association. First they were in an alliance to fight the British, then formed a loose organization under the Articles of Confederation; then a tighter federation under the Constitution; then even tighter under the 14th Amendment; then tighter again under the New Deal court rulings; and tighter still under further court rulings and legislation.

In the beginning the US was like the “United Nations of the Colonies”. Imagine if the United Nations of today had a lot more power over the countries of the world and they decided to elect the Secretary General with a popular vote from all of the people in the world. China and India would decide who was to rule over the whole world. (That’s an imperfect analogy to get a feel for the history and structure of what this is about.)

>“The general public casts their votes for Electors… but this isn't codified and the details are left to the states.”

States aren’t required a have a presidential election at all. They can just say that the governor picks the electors, or that they are picked at random. It’s totally up to the state legislatures how they pick the electors.

Part of the problem is that people don’t realize that they aren’t voting for president, they never have (unless they were one of few who were selected as an elector). They go to the polls and in most states it just has the name of presidential candidates and they cast a vote not realizing that they are not voting for president, they’re voting for an elector who will go to the state capitol and vote for president. And the development of realtime media like radio and TV added to the illusion that people were actually voting directly for the president during elections.

A huge problem with a popular vote is that California and New York will essential pick the president because of their out-sized populations. Do you really want Wall Street and Hollywood and Facebook and Amazon and Google to pick the president?

@trinsec @peterdrake @sojournTime

@Pat
> Part of the problem is that people don’t realize that they aren’t voting for president, they never have

A bit pedantic, surely? Your ballot says it's for President, the names on it are those of the candidates... people realise as much as they need to get on with the business of voting. Maybe it's not precise enough for a detailed discussion of electoral mechanics like we're having here, but for casting one's ballot it's a perfectly sufficient mental model. I only made the distinction to try and explain the context to our curious friend :)

> A huge problem with a popular vote is that California and New York will essential pick the president because of their out-sized populations.

No. If we're going to be pedantic, under a popular vote system the states have nothing to do with picking the president; only the individual voters do. The fact that a sizable number of them live in this state or that is incidental, really.

@trinsec @peterdrake @sojournTime

@khird

To clarify, in my toot, “ they never have” means “ they never have voted for president”.

>”A bit pedantic, surely?”

No, I don’t think so.

>”If we're going to be pedantic, under a popular vote system the states have nothing to do with picking the president; only the individual voters do. The fact that a sizable number of them live in this state or that is incidental, really.”

A comparison between the current system and the proposed system implies that the effects on particular states can be evaluated. Also, as a practical matter, under the proposed popular vote system candidates would likely focus their campaigns on dense population centers, buying ads in larger media markets, and making promises to the benefit of the states that have those large cities. (Under our federal system, federal benefits and subsidies are usually distributed to the state governments who in turn distribute them to the businesses and people in their states.) The way it is now, candidates need to visit the smaller states during a campaign, which provides more fairness. Under a popular vote system, they could just ignore those poorer states which would exacerbate the problem of “fly-over country”, and wealth would further concentrate in the high-populations areas.

@trinsec @peterdrake @sojournTime