Over at SISU: The Light Fantastic we have a link to this OpEd by Columnist Jeff Jacoby—"Massachusetts for Palin?".
I had meant to blog about this action by the General Court of Massachusetts when they voted to join the "National Popular Vote" compact", but got OBE'd. Then when Mr Jacoby did his column I was reminded, but got OBE'd again. So, this time I am taking advantage of the Sissy Willis blog post.
This is all about the General Court voting that the Electoral College Votes of our Commonwealth will be cast, not for who was the winner in Massachusetts, and not in a proportional way, based upon how WE voted (like in Maine), but for whoever wins the popular vote for President out across the fruited plain.
This was another less than heroic action on the part of our legislators. If they felt strongly about this they should have gone for a Constitutional Amendment. It isn't like this hasn't been done a couple of dozen times in our nation's history. We got popular election of US Senators via a Constitutional Amendment.
Or, they could have could have given us proportional voting, which would have been the fair and just thing to do.
But, no, not our Legislature.
Regards — Cliff
I thought the same thing until I did some research. Turns out we DO NOT need a constitutional amendment. The national popular vote proposal is following the precedent of how other electoral changes have been made . . . state action.
ReplyDeleteI was surprised to learn that our very right to vote for President isn’t in the Constitution at all. We can vote for President because the Legislature passed a STATE law giving us that right. The Constitution says that each state can decide for itself how the state’s electoral votes will be allocated. We now take for granted that we get to vote for President, but it wasn’t always that way.
I’m for a national popular vote. There is no reason why someone in Florida or Ohio should be more important than those of us in the Commonwealth because they happen to be a swing state. Let every vote be equal and let the candidate with the most votes win.