Tuesday, May 19, 2015

How The National Public Vote Will Destroy Our Republic

   In addition to all the other insidious threats that the American republic is facing in modernity, there is one that has flown under the radar of most Americans. It is a movement whose aim is to subvert the Founders' vision to such an extent that it will forever damage the republic they so carefully constructed. Not only do they seek change, but they seek to achieve it in a way that subverts the constitutional process for change because they know their idea is not popular enough to get the support needed to amend the constitution.
    This scourge to which I have alluded is called "National Popular Vote." The idea of NPV is to essentially eliminate one of the most brilliant mechanisms that our founders constructed to ensure continuation of the republic they founded, i.e. the electoral college. The framers of our constitution constructed a political system that was not a democracy, because their study of history taught them that pure democracies failed. This failure was often due to the development of a tyranny of the majority.
    The old adage to describe pure democracies is that they are analogous to two wolves and a sheep deciding what is for dinner. It was to give the minority protection from the majority that the founders wisely created the electoral college. Each state has electors in a quantity that matches the number of congressional seats in the state plus its two senators. In order for a president to be elected he must win a diversity of states that will gain him 270 electoral college votes. Each state allots their electoral college votes to the candidate that receives the majority of the popular vote in their state.
     What the NPV would essentially accomplish is the elimination of each state's sovereignty by forcing them to allot their electoral college votes to the candidate with the most number of popular votes nationally. This not only makes coalition building less likely (since a candidate would simply concentrate on pandering only to the needs of the big population centers in the country), but it would make fraud more likely. Instead of a candidate having to guess correctly which states may be swing states (since they are not the same every election), and trying to steal votes in those states, under NPV that same candidate would only need to steal votes anywhere to effect the national vote totals.
     Without the electoral college in operation as the Founders' intended, the major population centers in the country would essentially be able to impose their will upon the smaller states and population centers. And as I alluded to previously, fraud would be much easier because in a very real way the electoral college makes it harder for a candidate to steal an election because he would need to steal the popular vote of several states. In a post-NPV America, a candidate could steal an election simply with one vote anywhere.
     The NPV crowd is subverting the constitution by convincing states to sign a contract stating that in presidential elections they would allot their electoral college votes to the candidate with the most votes nationally and not simply the one with the most in their state. They have quietly been going about their business of destroying this republic using methods outside the remedies of the constitution. James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, et al are turning over their graves.

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