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June 4, 2008

Pollsters say R.I. favors getting rid of Electoral College

Three-quarters of Rhode Islanders want to scrap the Electoral College and choose future presidents by national popular vote, according to a poll conducted for a national advocacy group that is pushing for the switch.

The proposal is aimed at preventing a repeat of the 2000 election, when Democrat Al Gore got the most votes nationwide but Republican George W. Bush put together enough victories in key states to win a majority in the Electoral College and capture the White House.

Among the findings of the June 1 telephone survey of 800 potential Rhode Island voters: 74 percent support the national popular vote initiative, which cleared the Rhode Island Senate last week and is now pending in the House.

The bill, sponsored by Sen. Daniel Connors, D-Cumberland, would allow Rhode Island, with four electoral votes, to join a national compact of states that commit their electoral delegates to the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of who carried each state. The measure would only kick in if states representing a majority of the nation’s 538 electoral votes decide to make the same change.

Passage of the bill would make Rhode Island the fifth, alongside Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey and Maryland. (On May 1, both Houses of the Hawaii Legislature overrode their governor’s veto of the National Popular Vote bill and enacted the bill into law.) Opponents here are concerned that Rhode Island’s voice would be severely “diluted’’ by a switch to popular-vote selection.

The key polling question went like this: “There is a proposal to change the way we elect the president. The current system elected a president based on the state by state vote totals. The new proposal would switch to a system that elects the president according to the vote totals in all 50 states. Would you generally support or oppose switching to a system that counts the votes in all 50 states combined?’’

People on the other end of the telephone would signal their answers -- yes or no -- by pushing #1 or #2 on touch-tone phones.

The Rhode Island poll was conducted by Public Policy Polling in Raleigh, N.C. for National Popular Vote Inc., which describes itself as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporation whose purpose is "to study, analyze and educate the public regarding its proposal to implement a nationwide popular election of the President of the United States.

-- Journal staff writer Katherine Gregg

The National Advisory Board of National Popular Vote includes former Illinois Republican Congressmen John Anderson, an independent presidential candidate in 1980, and former U.S. Sen. Birch Bayh (D-Indiana), who lost the 1976 presidential nomination to Jimmy Carter.

A spokeswoman for the Clarendon Group, the local public-relations company handling the Rhode Island drive, identified John Koza of Los Altos Hills, Calif., as “the largest contributor (about 90 percent)’’ of the organization. which has “about 100 contributors in total.” A computer scientist, Koza was a co-inventor of the scratch-off lottery ticket, according to the New York Times.

According to polling results made public by the Clarendon Group: the mix of people reached for the survey included liberal Democrats (19 percent), moderate Democrats (22 percent, conservative Democrats (10 percent), liberal Republicans (3 percent), moderate Republicans (8 percent), conservative Republicans (8 percent) and those who described themselves as “other’’ (30 percent).

From these self-descriptions, the pollsters deduced that “support for the proposal is 78% among independents, 86% among liberal Democrats, 85% among moderate Democrats, 60% among conservative Democrats, 71% among liberal Republicans, 63% among moderate Republicans, and 35% among conservative Republicans – and women were keener on the idea than men, by a spread of 84-to-63 percent.

-- Katherine Gregg, Journal State House Bureau

Posted by Sue Areson at 4:07 PM | Permalink

Comments

The major shortcoming of the current system of electing the President is that presidential candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, campaign, or worry about the voter concerns in states where they are safely ahead or hopelessly behind. The reason for this is the winner-take-all rule under which all of a state’s electoral votes are awarded to the candidate who gets the most votes in each separate state. Because of this rule, candidates concentrate their attention on a handful of closely divided “battleground” states. Two-thirds of the visits and money are focused in just six states; 88% on 9 states, and 99% of the money goes to just 16 states. Two-thirds of the states and people are merely spectators to the presidential election.

Another shortcoming of the current system is that a candidate can win the Presidency without winning the most popular votes nationwide.

The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC). The bill would take effect only when enacted, in identical form, by states possessing a majority of the electoral votes—that is, enough electoral votes to elect a President (270 of 538). When the bill comes into effect, all the electoral votes from those states would be awarded to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC).

The bill would make every vote politically relevant in a presidential election. It would make every vote equal.

The National Popular Vote bill has been approved by 18 legislative chambers (one house in Colorado, Arkansas, Maine, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Washington, and two houses in Maryland, Illinois, Hawaii, California, and Vermont). It has been enacted into law in Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, and Maryland. These states have 50 (19%) of the 270 electoral votes needed to bring this legislation into effect.

See http://www.NationalPopularVote.com

Posted by: joreko at June 5, 2008 2:30 PM

What a joke.

Every day we read about hacking into computer web sites and databases, yet there is movement toward electronic voting, hahaha, maybe even voting by touch-tone phone. ROTFL.

But fooey, what good is it to 'fix' the vote, when ultimately you're left with the decision of the Electoral College votes?

Posted by: ROTFL at June 5, 2008 9:25 PM

June 4, 2008

Pollsters say R.I. favors getting rid of Electoral College

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