Utah Sen. Mike Lee has spent years cultivating a reputation as a constitutional expert. Yet, in his newly published texts to Mark Meadows before the Jan. 6 coup attempt, he blew his cover. Trying to show off his lawyerly chops, he suggested that if state legislatures didn’t present alternate slates of Trump electors, the attempt to reject the Electoral College votes was doomed to fail.
I’ll give him the doomed-to-fail-part.
I’m guessing that most of us, when given a moment, remember that when we vote in presidential elections we’re not actually voting for president, but for that candidate’s electors. What you might not recall is that those electors are mostly selected by their party’s hierarchy and only get to cast those electoral votes if their party’s candidate wins their state. So, if the Democrat wins your state, only Democratic electors get to vote, if the Republican wins, only Republican electors get to vote. Same thing for any other party with a candidate that wins the state.
Those electors of the popular vote winner in each state then must be certified, normally by the governor. But there’s a catch, all this should happen by the “safe harbor date.” Written into federal law as the Electoral Count Act of 1887, it falls between the general election in November and the meeting of the Electoral College in December (when electors formally cast their votes in each of the state capitols.) There’s no provision for a submission of “alternate slates of electors” to challenge certification more than month later in January, when Congress meets to ceremonially tally the vote. After the safe harbor date, there simply are no do-overs — barring coups, of course. But a constitutional expert would know all that, right?
This whole mess we (and Mike Lee) find ourselves in, is because the current electoral system prescribes that every state holds its own presidential election. In one or two states with unpredictable voters, a relatively small number of votes has the power to flip the result of the entire national election.
It’s this current state-by-state winner-take-all system that brings out “Cyber Ninjas” looking to “uncover the truth” in Arizona. Which by the way, they did, finding 99 more votes for Biden and 261 fewer for Trump.
It’s this system that animated the proposal of at least 250 new laws in 43 states to limit mail, early in-person and Election Day voting. It’s this system that has inspired some states to drastically reduce the number of ballot drop boxes and polling places. In Michigan, it’s now illegal to drive voters to the polls, and in Georgia, it’s illegal to give them food or water while they’re waiting in long lines to exercise their constitutional right to vote.
There is a way that’s close to being realized that could stop all this malarkey and make every voter in every state matter. It’s a system where it’s not important what state you vote in, because instead of some votes being stuck behind state lines, they accumulate with others of their same affiliation across the whole country. It’s a system that doesn’t favor political parties or individual states but does favor the candidate with the best ideas. It’s a system where a relatively few number of votes in a few states will never be enough to change the election outcome in a nationwide pool of 160 million votes.
The National Popular Vote Bill is state-by-state legislation that goes into effect when states equaling the minimum 270 electoral votes required to win the presidency have passed it into law. In the following general election, these National Popular Vote signatory states will put forward electors from the party of the nationwide, not statewide, popular vote winner.
Everyone who votes for president is part of a national popular vote, and in these new elections, the state that you vote in won’t matter, but voting itself will be more important than ever. There are currently states totaling 195 electoral votes signed on to the National Popular Vote Bill. When that number reaches 270, for the first time in American history, the nation will become one voting district for our one national office.
Got that, Mike?
Bunnie Keen
Bunnie Keen grew up in Idaho, went to college in Utah and has never had a vote for president go beyond state lines. She invites you to go to www.nationalpopularvote.com to learn how you can help promote this legislation across the country.
