This Just In

Measure would base presidential elections on popular support

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By JESSICA KERRY | July 2, 2007

With only four electoral votes and a consistently blue record in national elections, Rhode Island is decidedly not one of the battleground states that play a central role in electing the president. The candidates and their star surrogates visit the Biggest Little mainly to panhandle for campaign donations, as Rudy Giuliani and Bill Clinton did last month, generally ignoring the state once the race begins in earnest.

If the Electoral College depended on the national popular vote, however, Rhode Island would be every bit as important as Ohio or Florida come autumn of the election season.

With the 2008 presidential election already heated, the General Assembly may consider reforming the Electoral College by linking it, for the first time, to the nationwide popular vote. Sponsored in the Senate by state Senator Daniel J. Issa (D-Central Falls), the National Popular Vote bill would establish an interstate compact under which states pledge their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, rather than the statewide winner. As Issa says, the bill would give “more power to smaller states with fewer electoral votes.”

Under the current system, only a third of states are closely divided enough to be up for grabs in each election cycle, leaving the remaining two-thirds — including Rhode Island — to watch on TV as the candidates invest their time and money elsewhere. In the most hotly contested states, where the margin between victory and defeat is the smallest, an individual vote has significantly more weight than in the rest of the country.

In 2004, for example, it was Ohio’s 20 electoral votes that gave George W. Bush the necessary majority over John Kerry. In 2000, it was Florida, where a mere 537 votes from two counties tipped the scale toward Bush, giving him the state’s 25 electoral votes and paving the way for his Supreme Court-as¬sist¬ed national victory. (Gore won the overall popular vote by a clear margin.)

For the National Popular Vote bill to take effect, enough states to represent a majority of electoral votes — 270 of the total 538 — must approve it. Thus far, Maryland is the only state where it has been signed into law.

National Popular Vote, the nonprofit organization behind the proposal, counts 348 legislative sponsors in 47 states and enjoys editorial support from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Sun-Times, among other newspapers. The organization, which includes laymen and politicians from both major parties, has a related report, Every Vote Equal: A State-Based Plan for Electing the President by National Popular Vote, which can be read on its Web site.

It remains to be seen how the bill will fare in Rhode Island, where it will not face renewed consideration until after the next session starts in January.

Issa, who has five cosponsors in the House, remains upbeat. “Many times a good idea takes more than a year to be put into place,” he says. “I’m not disappointed. There were legitimate questions, and I think we’ve resolved them. We’re looking to the future.”

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