National Popular Vote forgotten in 2008 campaign

As the presidential election approaches, just eight days away, we haven't heard much about the National Popular Vote, a proposal to have the states sidestep the Electoral College system called for in our Constitution. It is essentially a conspiracy among the states in which the states agree to cast their electoral votes for whichever candidate wins the popular vote. Only three times in history, the most recent being 2000, has the winner of the popular vote not won the electoral vote.

The North Carolina Senate passed the National Popular Vote bill in May 2007. The argument made at the time was that poor North Carolina gets no respect in national elections. The state has voted Republican in every presidential election since 1976; it was reliable, so both presidential candidates pretty much ignored North Carolina.

Not so this year. Presidential and vice presidential candidates have scheduled appearances in North Carolina in the final two weeks of the campaign. Barack Obama and John McCain have visited the state several times this fall. So have Sarah Palin and Joe Biden. North Carolina is getting the attention the supporters of the National Popular Vote bill had promised would come our way if we abandoned the Electoral College system. The difference is that this year North Carolina is "in play." Obama thinks he might win here.

There are two things wrong with the National Popular Vote. First, it is an end run around the Constitution, which calls for electors to select the president based on the voting in each state. If we are to abandon the Electoral College, we should do so honestly, by a constitutional amendment, which would require ratification by three-fourths of the states.

Second, the National Popular Vote would not benefit often-ignored states in the way many advocates contend. A popular vote system would change political strategies, but not in the way you might think. Some populous but often ignored states, such as North Carolina and California, might get more attention from presidential candidates, but political strategy would shift from winning states to winning mass numbers of voters. The most populous states — California, New York, Pennsylvania, Florida, for example — would command most of the candidates' attention. Less-populous states that are now in play, such as Colorado, Iowa or West Virginia, would almost certainly be ignored. Candidates would fish where the largest number of fish are.

The changing political environment this year has shown that electoral strategy is not static. States that have not been contested can suddenly become "battleground states." It all depends on the country's political mood.

Good arguments can be made for a national popular vote strategy, and good arguments can also be made for keeping the Electoral College system, which emphasizes state sovereignty as the Founding Fathers intended. But these arguments should be made on their merits in a debate over a constitutional amendment, not over a back-door conspiracy to void the constitutional mandate to elect presidents via the Electoral College.