Illinois Business Journal - Illinois General Assembly passes bill to popularly elect the president

The Illinois General Assembly passed a bill that, if signed by Gov. Rod Blagojevich and passed in a similar measure by enough other states, will revoke the "winner-take-all" Electoral College system of electing American Presidents and replace it with the National Popular Vote.

And, since Blagojevich co-sponsored a Constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College when in Congress, supporters expect him to sign it.

The legislation, HB 1685, passed Jan. 9 in Springfield, enacts an agreement among the states to elect the president by National Popular Vote and takes effect only if enough other states pass similar legislation to total at least 270 electoral votes - a majority of the total of the 538 cast. So far, two states - Maryland and New Jersey - have enacted the legislation. Maryland has 10 electoral votes; New Jersey has 15. Illinois would add 21 more. Numerous other states are considering it.

Under the provisions of the law, participating states would cast all of their electoral votes for the candidate who received the most popular votes nationwide, regardless of whether he or she received the most votes in his or her own state. In the 2004 presidential election, for example, Illinois' 21 electoral votes would have gone to George Bush rather than to John Kerry as they did under the Electoral College system. In another example, if the National Popular Vote had been in effect in the 2000 presidential election, Gore would have been elected president rather than Bush.

The U.S. Constitution does not give citizens the right to vote for the president or vice president. Instead, it provides that these officers shall be selected by electors and leaves the selection of these electors up to the individual states. Each state is entitled to a number of electors equal to its number of senators and representatives so that more populous states cast more electoral votes than less populous states.

Dan Johnson-Weinberger, president of Progressive Public Affairs, has lobbied the Illinois General Assembly in support of the bill for the past two years.

"The way that the system has developed over the past 150 years," said Johnson- Weinberger, "is that most states have a law on the books that says that the winner of the statewide popular vote will get all of the state's electoral votes. That's not in the Constitution. It's nothing our founding fathers ever talked about. It's just state law. Illinois passed it in 1836."

According to Johnson-Weinberger, under the current system only the states that are relatively close in terms of the political support of each major party get the focus of presidential campaigns. States like Missouri, Iowa and Wisconsin get a lot of attention and their voters get wooed with campaigns to try to win their support. Whatever it takes to win Missouri, Iowa and Wisconsin are what presidential campaign candidates will do in order to win the race. But, says Johnson-Weinberger, they don't really care about what it takes to win the votes of Illinois citizens - or what it takes to win the votes of Indiana citizens - because those states are already safely Democrat or Republican.

"Consequently, and most importantly," said Johnson-Weinberger, "our views aren't as important to presidential candidates as are the views of people who happen to live in battleground states. Voters in Texas and voters in California are treated just like voters in Illinois, or just like voters in Wyoming or just like voters in Rhode Island. It's not so much, in my view, about whether the state you happen to live in is large or small. Whether your state is a battleground state or a safe state determines how much attention is paid to you in a presidential election."

State Rep. Tom Holbrook, a Democrat from Belleville, co-sponsored the bill in the Illinois House. He said that he's been a student of government and political science all of his adult life and he's always believed the Electoral College system was not fulfilling the intent of the framers of the Constitution.

"The bottom line is if you believe one man should equal one vote for president, then you should be for this (the National Popular Vote)," Holbrook said.

One of the problems under the current system, according to Holbrook, is that small states are disproportionately represented in the electoral vote to the disadvantage of the more populous states. That's because each state gets two senators - and therefore, two electoral votes - regardless of its population. The most populous state, California, gets 55 electoral votes - one per 663,000 people - while Vermont, the least populous state, gets three electoral votes - one per 208,000 people.

"Obviously, the National Popular Vote will give more, say, to states like Illinois," Holbrook said. "Right now a person who lives in Alaska or North Dakota or Wyoming, when he votes for president, his vote is worth about three of our votes in Illinois."

Johnson-Weinberger says that the current system is a ridiculous way to pick a U.S. president.

"Every voter ought to have the same influence over who the leader of the free world ought to be and that's really the thrust behind this legislation," he said.

According to Johnson-Weinberger, the impetus to do something about the Electoral College system was fueled by the chaotic election of 2000. That election resulted in arguments over hanging chads, lawsuits and counter lawsuits because the electoral votes of the state of Florida would ultimately decide who won the election and become the next president - despite the fact that Al Gore received nearly 600,000 more popular votes than George Bush nationwide. The election was finally decided in mid-December, nearly six weeks after election day.

At first there was an effort to amend the Constitution, but that requires passage by Congress and ratification of three-fourths of the states. Then John Koza, a consulting professor in the biomedical informatics program in the Department of Medicine and the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, devised the concept of changing the way that states allot their electoral votes with an interstate compact: the National Popular Vote.

According to Johnson-Weinberger, the current way of electing a president dramatically increases the odds of ending up with the kind of post-election litigation the U.S. experienced in the 2000 presidential election. The National Popular Vote would minimize that kind of chaos, he says.

Critics say the National Popular Vote amounts to an urban power grab that would shift politics entirely to urban issues in high population states and allow lower-caliber candidates to vie for the office.

"Rather that trying to eviscerate the Electoral College," said Pierre DuPont IV, chairman of the board for the National Center for Policy Analysis and former governor of Delaware in a Wall Street Journal editorial, "we should be embracing it. It was put in the Constitution to allow states to choose presidents, for we are a republic based on the separation of powers, not a direct democracy."

But Johnson-Weinberger disagrees. He says that if you actually study history, you come away with a very different view.

"Most of the northern delegates to the Constitutional convention wanted a National Popular Vote," said Johnson-Weinberger. "Basically the reason why the South just insisted on not having a National Popular Vote is because there were more white citizens in the North than there were in the South. But the Electoral College is based on Congressional apportionment. Congressional apportionment was hotly debated; the South ended up with the three-fifths compromise, which counted a slave as three-fifths of a person for purposes of Congressional apportionment. The result was that the South had more electoral votes than the North. So there's a reason why the first five presidents were slave owners from the South," he added. "I think it would be nice to eliminate the last vestiges of the slave power in our republic."