Much uproar has occurred in recent years surrounding the Electoral College.  The closeness of the Presidential election in 2000 and 2004 has given rise and impetus to a cry for change in the way America elects the Chief Executive.  Foremost among this movement is the National Popular Vote group, which seeks to allocate Electoral votes on the basis not of a single state's overall popular vote, but the national popular vote.  The state of Maryland has already signed the National Popular Vote Bill into law, and that bill has passed both houses in Hawaii, thereby clearing the way for the Governor of that state to sign it into law.  The Colorado Senate and Arkansas House have also passed this bill, and await action by their colleagues in the respective other houses.

While the NPV concept is laudable as an attempt to fix what some view to be a broken electoral system, it falls short in the one vital aspect of allocation of Electoral votes.  In the current system, only two states (Maine and Nebraska) have laws permitting the allocation of their Electoral votes based on congressional district, rather than the state overall totals.  In all other states, the allocation is winner-take-all.  Therefore, even if you have a race such as Wisconsin in 2004, where the margin of victory was just over 11,500 votes of over 2.98 million votes cast, all Electoral votes go to the winner of the state.  This is an unfair allocation, obviously, and more than 1.475 million people were effectively disenfranchised on a Presidential level by this allocation.  The National Popular Vote bill will give all Electoral votes from all states that pass that bill to the winner of the overall national popular vote.  Wisconsin's Electoral votes in 2004, by that narrow margin, went to John Kerry.  Had the NPV bill been passed by Wisconsin and gone into effect, that state's ten Electoral votes would have gone to George W. Bush, the national popular vote winner.  This would have disenfranchised the MAJORITY of Wisconsin's voters in 2004.  Obviously, the NPV solution is drastically flawed.

My thought, directly after the ruckus surrounding the 2000 election, was that states should allocate Electoral votes not as winner-take-all, but on a propotionate basis, with the first two Electorals going to the overall winner of the state's popular vote and the remainder divided up by percentage of votes cast.  It seems to me that this would be a more reflective and accurate presentation of the vote count state-by-state, while continuing to provide the smaller states with their equal say.

As we should know, Electoral votes are apportioned by the decennial census; each state is allotted two Electoral votes representing the two Senators from each states, and the rest are spread out among the several states according to population, with each Electoral vote representing the Representative from each Congressional district.  My plan would give the two Senatorial Electoral votes to the overall winner of the state, and allocate the remainder on a percentage-of-votes basis, thus more accurately reflecting the Congressional representation of the remaining Electorals. 

Let's use that Wisconsin 2004 vote total as an example.  John Kerry won all ten Electorals in 2004, while only beating George W. Bush in the popular vote by 1,489,504 to 1,478,120, or 49.7% to 49.4%.  Mr. Kerry only won a plurality of the total popular vote that year in Wisconsin, but he won the totality of the Electoral votes, which is patently unfair.  My system would allot two votes to Mr. Kerry as the overall winner of the state, and the remaining eight would have been divided equally, 4-4.  Therefore, Mr. Kerry would still have won Wisconsin, but the Electoral vote count would have been 6-4, rather than 10-0.  I contend that the 6-4 vote count more accurately reflects the wishes of the entire electorate of Wisconsin, and thus is more meaningful.

I can hear the Democrats hollering now, "Why are you picking on John Kerry?"  Okay, let's run Ohio 2004 through this formula.  Mr. Bush beat Mr. Kerry by 50.8% to 48.7% (a vote margin of roughly 118,000 votes), thereby garnering all 20 Electoral votes.  Under the proportionate system, Mr. Bush takes the two overall votes, and the 18 remaining are divided by subtracting 5.5% from each candidate's total until all votes are distributed.  Both candidates would then gain nine Electorals each, making the total for Ohio 11-9 Bush.  This is an extremely accurate representation of the vote in Ohio 2004 (the "battleground state" for that year), and all voters of that state could feel that their vote meant something.

This system could also reflect the impact of a third-party candidacy.  H. Ross Perot ran in 1992 and 1996 under the Reform Party banner, and amassed nearly 19% of the popular vote in 1992 and over 8% in 1996.  However, no Electoral votes were allocated to Perot in either year because he did not win a plurality of votes in any state.  My system would reflect his presence and the impact his candidacy had on the race.  Taking Ohio once again as our example, in 1996 Bill Clinton won 47% of the popular vote, followed by Bob Dole at 40% and Perot at 11%, which means Clinton took all 21 Electoral votes.  Under the proportional system, Clinton takes the two winner votes, and the other nineteen are allocated by subtracting 5.26% per vote from the totals for all three candidates.  Therefore, the final count for Ohio 1996 would be Clinton 11, Dole 8, and Perot 2.  Using this method shows that Mr. Perot's candidacy did indeed have an effect on both the 1992 and 1996 elections, and the possibility of winning Electoral votes without having to win an entire state might encourage challenges and higher-profile candidacies from smaller parties such as the Libertarians, the Greens, or the Constitutionists.

My quick review of the overall totals from 2004 and 2000 indicate that while the Electoral vote totals would be closer than what actually occurred, in neither case would the result have been different; George W. Bush would still have been seated as the 43rd President.  However, preliminary numbers indicate that the 1992 election may well have been thrown to the House of Representatives, as it does not seem that any candidate would have achieved the 270 Electorals necessary for election.  I will run the numbers properly and post them on this site when I have them.

The Cold Hard Fact, however, remains the same:  The National Popular Vote Bill remains flawed because it continues to promulgate the winner-take-all mentality that is one of the chief complaints with the current Electoral College system.  The NPV system is worse, though, because it takes away from the separate states their ability to declare their own preferences for Chief Executive, and gives that ability to the general electorate.  I do not believe the claims that the NPV will force candidates to campaign in all states, rather than a few key ones.  My position is that candidates will never be seen outside of major urban areas such as New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago (which would comprise some 25-30% of the entire national electorate) in an attempt to win the overall national vote.  That is hardly what the NPV people claim to want, and their kneejerk reaction to close votes in 2004 and 2000 are, to my mind, simple partisan power-grab politics.  Proportional allocation better reflects the wants of the voters of the separate states, and it will force the candidates to campaign in smaller states (like my home of Kansas) in order to gain as many Electorals as they can.  And THAT is an improvement over the current system.