Connecticut joins states pledging Electoral College votes to popular vote winner

William Cummings | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Connecticut will give Electoral College votes to popular vote winner Connecticut’s State Senate has just passed a bill that will allow the state to give its Electoral College votes to the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote. Veuer's Chandra Lanier has the story.

Connecticut lawmakers passed a bill to join states that have pledged their Electoral College votes to the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote.

The state Senate voted 21-14 to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact on Saturday after the House of Representatives narrowly passed the bill 77-73 last week. The measure now heads to Democratic Gov. Dannel P. Malloy who has indicated he will sign it into law.

"The vote of every American citizen should count equally, yet under the current system, voters from sparsely populated states are awarded significantly more power than those from states like Connecticut," Malloy said in a statement Saturday. "This is fundamentally unfair. The National Popular Vote compact will ensure an equal vote for every American citizen, regardless of which state they happen to live in."

The aim of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is to "guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes" by having states pledge all the electoral votes to the candidate who gets the highest vote total nationally.

The compact would take effect if states with 98 more electoral votes enact the legislation. At that point, the members would represent a majority of the Electoral College and possess the 270 votes needed to elect the president.

The compact has grown quickly since Maryland became the first state to join in 2007, but Nate Silver has argued that the movement could be close to hitting a wall. The states that have joined the compact are all solidly Democratic: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton won all of them by double digits in 2012 and 2016.

To reach 270 electoral votes, the most contested states — which are the ones that benefit most from the current system — or some red states will have to join the compact.

President Trump won the 2016 election in the Electoral College 304-227 but lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, making him the fifth president (and second in two decades) to lose the popular vote.

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