Opinion

Make Texas votes matter in presidential elections Agreement among states would shift emphasis to popular, not electoral, votes

Rob Richie: The compact would undo the “winner- take-all” system of electing the president. Rob Richie: The compact would undo the “winner- take-all” system of electing the president. Photo: / Photo: / Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Make Texas votes matter in presidential elections 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

The first presidential debate of the 2016 election cycle is a reminder that Texans better enjoy their opportunity to affect the presidential election in the primary season. Outside of their checkbook, there’s no chance that Texas and its millions of voters will matter after March.

That bizarre reality underscores how current “winner-take-all” state rules governing the Electoral College violate our founders’ vision of all states mattering in choosing the president. Unlike elections for governor, winning the most votes is irrelevant. Partisans have new opportunities to game outcomes through changing the rules governing how electoral votes are allocated or seeking to inflate or depress votes in a handful of swing states.

Most troubling, our 50-state map has essentially become a gerrymander.

In fall 2016, the presidential campaigns will focus all their resources on a handful of swing states. Due to winner-take-all rules, campaigns ignore any “spectator state,” such as Texas, where one candidate is comfortably ahead.

In 2012, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and their running mates held campaign events in only 12 states after the conventions. The campaigns and their allies targeted 99.6 percent of their ads at voters in those same 12 states.

Because of the modern era’s highly predictable voting patterns, the number of swing states has declined sharply, and their identity has become increasingly predetermined. Of the mere nine states that received campaign attention in 2012 beyond the national norm, all had also been among the 2008 battleground states. Of the fully 36 states that were treated as spectator states in both 2008 and 2012, not a single one is projected to be a swing state next year — and that includes 12 of our 13 smallest states that some mistakenly think are helped by our current rules.

It’s not simply a matter of affecting whose voice is heard in campaigns and what issues dominate the debates. It affects governance as well.

John Hudak, in his book “Presidential Pork,” finds that swing states receive nearly 10 percent more federal grants than nonswing states in the years before an election. The White House is much more likely to send presidents to swing states — for example, Obama was in North Carolina 16 times in his first presidential run, yet just visited South Carolina for his first time as president this year.

Reforming winner-take-all

The problems of the current Electoral College system are grounded in state “winner-take-all” laws that award all of a state’s electoral votes to the candidate who wins the most votes in that state. That winner-take-all rule was not the norm in early elections of president, and it was opposed by many of our nation’s founders, including the Constitution’s chief architect, James Madison. But by the 1830s it had been enacted in nearly every state to ensure state partisans could provide maximum support for their party’s nominee.

Given its failures today, it’s time for reform. One idea is to allocate one electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district and two to the statewide winner. Another is to follow what many states do in presidential primary elections and allocate electors by proportional representation.

But while often initially attractive, both proposals are fraught with opportunities for partisan mischief, as nearly all politicians will support or oppose them based on whether they will help or hurt their party nationally. If done only in Texas, for example, they would be a gift to Democrats in the national tally.

They also fail the test of making every vote and every state meaningful in every election. More than 4 in 5 congressional districts are fundamentally uncompetitive. In Texas, only one of its 36 districts in 2012 was won by a presidential candidate by less than 10 percent.

As to proportional allocation plans, the fact that states are limited to allocating whole electoral votes would result in perverse dynamics that will advantage some states based solely on whether polling indicates the candidates are near a percentage of the vote that could result in the shift of one electoral vote.

Done nationally in all states via a constitutional amendment, the congressional district proposal would also increase the number of candidates winning elections while losing the popular vote, as Republican nominees would win every close election. Because Democrats are more concentrated in cities and majority-minority congressional districts, for example, Romney would have won the 2012 election comfortably in a congressional district system despite losing nationally by nearly 5 million votes.

Given this skew, it is inconceivable that a constitutional amendment could pass.

The fairest proportion in presidential elections is one person, one vote. Achieving such a national popular vote through a constitutional amendment is often proposed, but would forever remove states from the ability to structure how best to elect the president, and would require two-thirds support in both chambers of Congress and the backing of legislatures in 38 states — both tremendous hurdles absent a catastrophic election we all hope never occurs.

National Popular Vote plan

Fortunately, states have the power to achieve a popular vote through entry into the National Popular Vote interstate compact. Laid out in detail at nationalpopularvote.com, the plan is based on two powers granted to states under the Constitution: States have exclusive power to decide how to allocate electoral votes, and they have the power to enter into formal, binding agreements — such as the Colorado River Compact.

The National Popular Vote compact establishes that participating states will award all of their electoral votes to the slate of the candidate who wins the national popular vote in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It is activated if — and only if — the participating states collectively have a majority of votes in the Electoral College.

States enter the compact one by one, passing a simple statute. If by 2020, states adopting the compact collectively have a majority of electoral votes (currently 270 of 538), the agreement is set in stone for the year, and the White House is guaranteed to the candidate who wins the popular vote.

Electoral votes would still elect the president, and the total number of electoral votes won by a candidate might vary based on which states are in the compact, but no one would focus on electoral vote margins. All attention before and after the election would be on the popular vote. Gone would be the red-blue maps on Election Night and the early projections of winners while Western states are still voting.

Every vote would count the same, whether cast in Iowa or Texas.

Defenders of the status quo present a grab bag of arguments, but all fall apart on close examination. Elections by one person, one vote are tested and meet voters’ expectation of transparency and popularity. If Texas can manage a statewide popular vote election, so can our nation

Since the plan’s launch in 2006, legislation has been introduced in all 50 states and passed into law in 10 states and the District of Columbia, with a combined 165 electoral votes. Passage in Texas would mean 38 more electoral votes, putting it over 203 votes — and signal more spectator states that it’s time to end their second-class status in elections for our president.

The bottom line is that candidates for our one national office should have incentives to speak to everyone, and all Americans should have the power to hold their president accountable. Only a national popular vote will do. Now, we have a sensible road map for change.

Rob Richie has been executive director of FairVote since its founding in 1992. He is co-author of “Every Vote Equal: A State-Based Plan for Electing the President by National Popular Vote” and “Reflecting All of Us” about how to reform congressional elections. He can be reached at rr@fairvote.org.