[ad_1]
Deanna Paul
Reporter covering national and last-minute news
Colorado has joined a list of states that plan to give their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the national popular vote.
Governor Jared Polis (D) signed the law on Friday, uniting Colorado to 11 other states and the District of Columbia in the National Popular Vote Inter-State Compact, whose members pledge to use their electoral vote no matter what the candidate who will win the national popular vote.
The bill will come into force only if the law is passed by states representing at least 270 votes in the electoral college, which is the amount needed to win the presidency. With the addition of Colorado, this number is now 181.
Rhode Island, Vermont, Hawaii, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, Washington State, New Jersey, the State of New York, Illinois, California and the District of Columbia have also been promulgated. New Mexico, whose Senate approved the law earlier this week, may be the next state to join.
Since Republican-controlled legislatures have not adhered to this effort, it may be difficult to change the procedures of college delegates in enough states to reach the combined 270 votes needed to become president, Reed Hundt , president and co-founder of Making Every Vote Count, told the Washington Post last month. Other states where the initiative could move are smaller and left, he said.
Under the Constitution, states have the power to determine how they will vote in national elections. Most states have victor's laws, which allot their electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes within the state. Two states, Maine and Nebraska, divided their electoral votes.
Since many states are dominated by the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, the winner of a presidential election is run in advance. In addition, the electoral votes reflecting the representation in the US House and Senate, some states have very large contingencies for constituencies, while others are much smaller. As a result, a handful of "battleground" states are often the ones on which candidates focus their attention. Nevertheless, the candidates prefer to win as many states as possible and the popular vote to define a public mandate for their agendas.
Five of the 45 presidents of the nation took office without winning the national popular vote, including Donald Trump. Electoral college losses may be narrow: if Senator John F. Kerry had obtained 60,000 additional votes in Ohio in 2004, he would have won the elections, even though President George W. Bush had 3 million votes in the popular vote.
Due to changes in the demographics of the states, elections are now being held in a small number of alternative states, Hundt told the Post. In the 2012, 2016 and 2020 elections, nearly 40 states, representing about 80 percent of the country's population, were or will be ignored by both candidates, he said.
"It's a new American demographic group, which shows that the 18th century electoral system no longer works," he said. "At the time of the drafting of the Constitution, no one thought that 80% of the population would be irrelevant."
Read more:
The popular vote could decide the presidential election of 2020, if these states succeed
A popular national vote has come closer to reality
[ad_2]
Source link