Nancy Harman, in her July 9 letter (“Popular vote compact would disregard Mainers“) shows her own misunderstanding of how the national popular vote compact works. She claims that Maine voters would be ignored in favor of more populous states such as New York. She claims Maine voters would be disenfranchised by the NPV. This is wrong.

I wonder if she thinks that, in any election, when Candidate X gets more votes than Candidate Y, and therefore wins an election, that the people who voted for Y were disenfranchised? This is ludicrous. Those who voted for Candidate Y merely lost the election. They were not disenfranchised. That is how democracy works. The person with the most votes wins.

In this one and only country-wide office – the president of the United States – we should all have an equal say. States don’t vote for the president of the United States, nor do counties, towns or regions. Individuals do. Every single one of us. And every single one of us must have that vote counted exactly the same as everyone else’s. That is the only fair way to determine the winner.

It is not acceptable that, in the current system of using the Electoral College to determine the winner of the presidential election, some people’s votes count way more than others, merely because of where they live. Montanans’ votes, for example, weigh much more than those of New Yorkers or Texans, just because the latter are more populated states. These are the people who are currently being disenfranchised. Five presidents have been seated even though they didn’t get as many votes as the other candidate, because that is how the Electoral College is set up. It is long past time to rid ourselves of this arbitrarily unfair method of choosing the single most powerful person in the country. The national popular vote compact does exactly that.

Nancy O’Hagan
Portland