I think this sort of thing is pretty straightforwardly an impediment to democracy and demonstrates that we need to abandon the electoral college. We do have an at least philosophical commitment to one person, one vote, and the electoral college undermines that both metaphorically (candidates don't see any need to campaign in states they are sure to win, or sure to lose, or those whose electoral votes are too small to justify the time and expense) and literally (two states with different populations can have the same number of electoral votes, meaning that the people who represent the difference between the two populations have their votes effectively thrown away).
All of my thoughts on this are retreads of things that have been said again and again. But I was struck watching this at how perverse a system is when the states that support a candidate the most are precisely the ones which he needs pay the least attention to. And of course it's a recipe for a disinterested populace, although the media and their certainty (near the big day) of who will win does a pretty good job of convincing people that their votes don't count anyway. I've heard it argued that a national popular vote increases the chances for voter fraud and other shenanigans, although I've never been sure how, exactly. And as we've seen, we can have shenanigans aplenty in our current system. Indeed, putting so much importance in so few places encourages shady behavior in those places, and it empowers local officials to have way more influence than they otherwise would.
To do list: reduce the number of times I say "thing" on this blog. And "under girds".
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Senator Birch Bayh (D–Indiana) summed up the concerns about possible fraud in a nationwide popular election for President in a Senate speech by saying in 1979, "one of the things we can do to limit fraud is to limit the benefits to be gained by fraud. Under a direct popular vote system, one fraudulent vote wins one vote in the return. In the electoral college system, one fraudulent vote could mean 45 electoral votes, 28 electoral votes."
In Illinois in the 1960s, accusation of vote fraud by both political parties were commonplace. In 1960, a switch of 4,430 votes in Illinois and a switch 4,782 votes in South Carolina would have given Nixon a majority of the electoral votes. However, 4,430 votes in Illinois were only a focus of controversy in 1960 because of the statewide winner-take-all rule. John F. Kennedy led Richard M. Nixon by 118,574 popular votes nationwide, so 4,430 votes were not decisive in terms of the national vote count. Of course, if Nixon had carried Illinois and a state such as South Carolina in 1960, Nixon would have won a majority of the votes in the Electoral College, despite not receiving a majority of the popular votes nationwide.
see www.NationalPopularVote.com
susan
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