Michael Buhelt’s letter April 1 (“Founding fathers knew pitfalls of national vote for president”) implies those that favor the national popular vote compact don’t understand it. Not so. The current Electoral College system is imperfect; the national popular vote compact is also imperfect. The perfect system most representative of the will of the American people would be one national popular vote, the sum of all American voters.
Polls say 65% of Americans would like to see the Electoral College replaced with one popular vote. To eliminate the Electoral College would require a Constitutional amendment and that’s not likely to happen soon. Under the Electoral College system, in both 2000 and 2016, the candidate for U.S. president receiving the most votes from the total of all American voters, did not become president: in 2000, Al Gore had 48.4% of the vote to G.W. Bush’s 47.9%; in 2016, Hillary Clinton received 48.2%, Donald Trump, 46.1%. So, in 2016 you could say some 3 million-plus Americans’ votes for Clinton did not count.
Buhelt maintains that under the NPVC Maine would “surrender” its vote to states with larger populations, but under the compact the winner still comes down to whichever candidate receives the most votes from all Americans, including those from Maine. Although imperfect, this seems more likely to result in a true representation of the will of all Americans. Buhelt gives a hypothetical example of how under the compact the winner of the Maine vote might “forfeit” to the larger popular vote. The outcome of both the 2000 and 2016 presidential elections under the Electoral College were not “hypothetical;” we know they did not represent the will of a majority of American voters. We strive to be a democracy: “a system of government by the whole population.”
Jeff Christiansen
Gorham
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