While most people aren’t aware of it, there’s a movement afoot to completely change the way we elect our president — and its success would have serious consequences for our nation’s future.
The plan is a National Popular Vote Interstate Compact that would neuter the Electoral College and give the presidency to the winner of the popular vote. Under this agreement, your state would award its electors to the candidate winning the most votes nationally — even if a majority of your state’s residents voted for a different candidate.
The compact will take effect once enough states ratify it to constitute at least 270 electoral votes, a majority of the total 538. And with Governor Andrew Cuomo having signed a bill on April 15 making New York the 10th state party to the agreement (the District of Columbia is also on board), its 29 electoral votes bring the compact’s total up to 165, well more than halfway to the goal. The other signatory states are California, Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois, Hawaii, Washington, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Rhode Island.
Moreover, over the past several years the compact has been passed by one house in Nevada, Arkansas, Colorado, Maine, North Carolina, Connecticut, Delaware, Michigan, New Mexico, and Oregon. While in some states, such as North Carolina, the measure has died in the other legislative house, if it were to eventually pass both houses and be ratified, these states would represent 78 more votes, bringing the compact’s total to 242 — just 28 shy of activation threshold. At that point the agreement would conceivably be just one state away (Florida) from taking effect.
To many people the compact is an easy sell. What’s wrong with a popular-vote system? But as political consultant and pundit Dick Morris explained recently in a Newsmax article, there’s a reason why virtually all the compact’s proponents are leftists, with every ratifying state — and 80 percent of the one-house states — having voted for Obama. The movement is also receiving funding from radical leftist George Soros’ Center for Voting and Democracy. Morris writes:
Democrats usually see a smaller percentage of their people go to the polls than Republicans do.
Under the electoral vote system, they figure why beat the drums to get a high turnout in New York City when the state will go Democrat anyway? But, if its [sic] the popular vote that matters, the big city machines can do their thing — with devastating impact.
And think of the chances for voter fraud! Right now, the biggest cities, the ones most firmly in Democratic control (e.g. Washington DC, New York, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco, etc.) are all solidly in blue states. Not only does this make it unnecessary to maximize turnouts there, but it also makes it unnecessary to promote double voting, fraudulent voting, and all the other tricks of the trade at which Democrats excel.
Morris is not exaggerating. Criminality is most prevalent in inner cities, and the criminality known as vote fraud is no exception. We’ve all heard stories about illegal aliens casting ballots and precincts in which Mitt Romney received not even one vote in 2012, but perhaps the most significant vote-stealing method is surrogate voting.
I was contacted in 2005 by a local Washington, D.C., community leader (who wished to remain anonymous; I dubbed him “Deep Vote”) who had “done some computer work for several candidates over the years in DC,” as he put it. He also had conducted his own study of surrogate voting and related the mechanics of how it’s perpetrated. As I wrote at the time:
Experience has taught Deep Vote that it is transiency which provides Democrat political operatives with the most golden of opportunities to steal votes. In depressed urban areas an inordinate number of residents move in and out every year, with some taking up residence for only a brief time…. [This] inevitably leaves a large number of people who no longer live in an area on the voter rolls. The local authorities, says Deep Vote, ‘are always somewhat late on removing non-residents.’ All the Democrat operatives need do then is ascertain who these people are and vote for them.
… [T]he Democrat operatives who are central to this fraud are known as ‘block captains’ and ‘apartment captains.’ Deep Vote tells us that a captain is a GOTV (Get out the vote) term for a campaign volunteer who knows the territory and is given a list of voters on his block or in his building who are believed to be sympathetic to his candidate. He is then charged with the task of driving these partisans to the polls.
… Deep Vote then explains that since captains are usually ‘local/neighborhood leaders’ or in the least have ‘been there for a while,’ they ‘would know who has moved out.’ It is then that the captains examine the voter rolls and ‘vote those people.’
This type of vote fraud can’t nearly as easily be perpetrated in more rural, Republican areas; this is not only because there’s relatively little transiency but because everyone tends to know everyone else, making it harder for a surrogate to masquerade as a given, but now gone, voter. Not only are local poll workers in monolithically Democrat inner cities often sympathetic to these schemes, however, but big-metropolis anonymity usually ensures that they wouldn’t detect the deception, anyway. As an example, when I lived in the Bronx, I never had to show identification to vote despite the poll workers’ not knowing me at all. Consequently, after I moved away, anyone who knew I was gone could have voted under my name simply by claiming to be me.
Critics say that this is why Democrats steadfastly oppose voter ID laws. They also say this explains why, as Larry Clifton at Examiner.com put it, “The Obama administration, through [Eric] Holder, has been relentless in trying to block Florida and other states from purging illegal and dead voters from state voter rolls.”
To understand the severity of this problem, consider Democrat-leaning swing state Ohio. As the Columbus Dispatch’s Darrel Rowland wrote in 2012:
More than one out of every five registered Ohio voters is probably ineligible to vote.
… Of the Buckeye State’s 7.8 million registered voters, nearly 1.6 million [most of which bear Democrat registrations] are regarded as “inactive.” That generally means either they haven’t voted in at least four years or they apparently have moved.
In other words, there were conceivably 1.6 million opportunities for surrogate vote fraud in Ohio at the time. Note that just 10 percent of that figure accounted for Obama’s margin of victory over Mitt Romney in that state in 2012.
After being sued by the organizations Judicial Watch and True the Vote, Ohio finally agreed in January to participate in a program called Cross-Check and take other measures designed to purge the voter rolls of ineligible voters. Whether such initiatives survive the inevitable Democrat court challenges, however, remains to be seen.
Regardless, scrapping the Electoral College would tilt the scales further in favor of the vote hustlers. It would also, warn some critics, move us further from being a republic and closer to being a democracy, a system of glorified mob rule that, to paraphrase James Madison, is in general as short in its life as it is violent in its death.
