The DNC's Plan To Subvert The Electoral College
nationalpopularvote.com
nationalpopularvote.com
hooktu.be
State legislatures are given the exclusive right to decide how those electors are to be chosen. This is where Boies believes he has an opportunity to reverse the advantage President Trump earned in the Electoral College.
Currently, all but two states mandate a "winner-take-all" rule for guiding how electors vote. In other words, based on whichever presidential candidate wins the popular vote within that state, all of the state's electors are expected to vote for that candidate. Only Maine and Nebraska arrange matters differently: two of those states' electoral votes are awarded to whomever wins the state's popular vote, then the additional electoral votes to whomever wins in each of the states' congressional districts.
This does not usually make for earth-shaking results in Maine and Nebraska. But it would in the places where Boies filed suit, and especially in Texas, and he has buttressed his complaint by arguing that the winner-take-all rule effectively cancels out the vote "of each and every citizen voter…unless it is cast for the winning candidate."
In Texas, for instance, 3.8 million Texans voted for Clinton, but the winner-take-all rule directed all of Texas' 38 Electors to deliver their votes for Trump. And since a large proportion of Clinton's voters in Texas were black and Hispanic, Boies argues that the winner-take-all rule also violates the Fourteen Amendment's guarantee of equal protection and "perpetuates racial discrimination in voting and the dilution of minority voting power."
What Boies proposes as a substitute is buried in the last page of the suit: "a proportional method of distributing Electors…based on the number of votes each party's candidate receives statewide." Boies is somewhat coy about what is meant by a "proportional method."
If we take it literally, then on a proportional basis, Clinton would have won the votes of exactly 15.56 Texas electors, and Trump 18.80. Applied to Pennsylvania, Clinton would have earned 9.49 electoral votes (instead of none) and Trump 9.63 instead of 20. Take all 50 states, and Clinton suddenly wins 292.20 electoral votes and Trump 247.96.
Except that this is not how the Constitution, and the elections it mandates, is supposed to work. First of all, the there is no requirement that the presidential election involve a popular vote in the first place. Indeed, over the history of the republic electors have been chosen by methods other than a popular vote in a number of states. As recently as 2000, the Florida legislature considered choosing the electors to resolve the Bush-Gore impasse.
Second, the Constitution created a federal system where the states choose separately; there is no constitutional "national vote" for president. Boies's plan effectively reduces the electoral vote to a statistical reflection of the constitutionally irrelevant national popular in in this emailvote, at which point it will be worth asking: Why bother having state electors at all? And after that, why bother with federalism?