The election last year was the fifth in which the candidate with the most votes lost the presidency. It’s a dangerous way to run a democracy that depends upon the people’s trust.

Florida could help in a big way to put an end to Electoral College malfunctions, but the necessary legislation doesn’t appear to have a warm welcome in Tallahassee. It should. Republican leaders there need to consider that what has helped their party in the past could easily hurt them in the future.

In 2004, President George W. Bush, who won by 3.5 million votes nationally, would have lost if only 59,301 people in Ohio — or 537 people in Florida — had voted differently. In 1968, shifts of only 77,224 votes in Missouri and Illinois would have thrown the Nixon-Humphrey election into the House of Representatives, where George Wallace was itching to make a deal for his 46 electors.

Repealing the Electoral College by constitutional amendment is a tall order, but there’s an easier and very practical way to elect the president by direct popular vote. It’s called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact — an agreement by participating states to award all their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the nation’s popular vote. The agreement takes effect only when joined by states whose electoral votes total 270, a majority.

Ten states and the District of Columbia, accounting for 165 electoral votes, have joined the compact, leaving 105 electoral votes to go. But most of the states that could provide the remainder are led by less-enthusiastic Republicans.

Florida, with 29 electoral votes, could provide timely momentum by joining the compact, as proposed in House Bill 367. The sponsors are Reps. Joseph Geller, D-Aventura, and Lori Berman, D-Lantana. Their bill has been assigned to two subcommittees where it will likely languish — without prompting from the public.

The Electoral College was conceived by politicians who didn’t trust the people to select a president wisely and counted on elected surrogates in the states to make a better choice. The intent, clearly stated by Alexander Hamilton in “The Federalist,” was to deny the presidency to people with “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity.” There was, he wrote, “a moral certainty that the office of President will seldom fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”

It has been said that Donald Trump was the man the founders feared. Even Trump, however, remarked as president-elect that he would prefer direct popular election because “it brings all the states into play.” That spoke to the harm the system inflicts even when the nominees with the most popular votes actually win.

On account of the Electoral College, candidates now spend virtually their entire campaigns in as few as 10 “battleground” states. Three of the four largest states are totally ignored. The Democrats take New York and California for granted, just as the Republicans do with Texas.

“The nation as a whole is not going to elect the next president. Twelve states are,” Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a presidential candidate at the time, said in 2015.

Implementing the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would make it necessary for the candidates to look for votes everywhere, and perhaps to move more toward the center to get them. This is in no sense an exclusively “liberal” goal.

“This is a states’ rights issue, a true federalist solution to the current problem where four out of five Americans are ignored by presidential candidates,” said an endorsement for the compact signed by eight former national chairs of the firmly conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, also known as ALEC. “Every person — in every state — has the right to decide who is elected President.”

The nation needs that reform. The presidential election should be relevant to everyone, whether they live in a “battleground” state or not.

Every American is entitled to the assurance that future presidents will all represent the majority, rather than the quirks of an archaic system that has failed so often and, now, so badly.


Editorial
Sun Sentinel


(Tribune Content Agency)