Episode 68– Episode 68- Do we, or Don’t we need the Electoral College?

Welcome to Richard Helppie’s Common Bridge. The fiercely nonpartisan discussion that seeks policy solutions to issues of the day. Rich is a successful entrepreneur in the technology, health and finance space. He and his wife, Leslie, are also philanthropists with interest in civic and artistic endeavors with a primary focus on medically and educationally under-served children.

Richard Helppie:

Hello and welcome to the Common Bridge. We have a couple of really great guests today. Trent England is the executive director of Save Our States. He’s previously served as executive vice president for both the Oklahoma Council Of Public Affairs and The Freedom Foundation and was a legal policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation. Trent was a Publius Fellow of the Claremont Institute in 2008. He is the author of Why We Must Defend The Electoral College and a contributor to The Heritage Guide to the Constitution and One Nation Under Arrest. Trent earned his JD from the George Mason University School of Law. He has a BA in government from Claremont McKenna College.

Also with us today is Scott Drexel. Scott is a longtime advisor to some of the country’s most active Democratic donors, activists, and business leaders. He serves on finance committees for several national democratic committees and has been active in the campaigns of numerous candidates. He’s worked in over 30 states on behalf of the National Popular Vote.

Gentlemen, welcome to the Common Bridge. We’re delighted that you’ve taken some time to spend with us. Scott, can you tell us about the National Popular Vote and specifically, why does it exist? Who founded it? How is it funded? What’s the annual budget, and what would be a successful outcome for your organization, and what is your role? And I do want to direct people to the website, NationalPopularVote.com too. And we’ll put that on our website, RichardHelppie.com. Scott, can you fill us in about your organization the National Popular Vote?

Scott Drexel:

Sure. National Popular Vote, we got started back in 2006, actually. So at its core, the National Popular Vote is exactly what it sounds like. It is a piece of state-based legislation that would guarantee the White House to the candidate who receives the most votes in all 50 States and the District of Columbia. So as I mentioned, we got started in 2006. That was six years after the less recent of the two more recent wrong way presidential elections in 2000-in Bush vs Gore, and 10 years before the most recent in 2016 between Secretary Clinton and President Trump. The idea behind National Popular Vote had less to do with the individual outcome of those two elections and far more to do with really two base concepts of American public life and democracy and government, which is every vote should be equal. And the person with the most votes should win. So the way National Popular Vote works is an agreement between the states that any enacting state that passes the National Popular Vote bill would award its electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote across all 50 States and the District of Columbia with a very special trigger on it. The law would not take effect until states representing the majority of the electoral college have opted into the same agreement. So far today 15 states and the District of Columbia, which together account for 196 electoral votes have passed the bill and enacted into law. That’s 74 electoral votes shy of the 270 electoral votes needed to put it into effect. So nothing happens at this point. The bill sits on the books in those 15, 16, and growing number of jurisdictions, until the total number reaches 270, once it does the candidate with the most votes in all 50 States and the District of Columbia wins.

Richard Helppie:

And how is National Popular Vote funded, and how does it get it sorts of funding and what’s its annual budget?

Scott Drexel:

Sure. It’s a C4. We operate with contributions from a network of individuals. The primary funder has been a gentleman named John Koza, who also was the originator and the author of the National Popular Vote bill. But over the course of the last 14 years, he’s been joined by a number of Democratic, Republican, Independent leaning donors who’ve funded our efforts over the years. I won’t get too much into our annual budget. But I think that primary use of it is our national team working with local activist groups and legislators on the grounds in the states where we’re actively pursuing enactments and educating members of legislators who aren’t that familiar with National Popular Vote about why the current system poses a number of disadvantageous problems and why the National Popular Vote would be a solution to them.

Richard Helppie:

Trent, Save Our States. Why does your organization exist? Who founded it, how’s it funded and what would be a successful outcome for your organization? And of course we will not only make mention of NationalPopularVote.com, but the website SaveOurStates.com and we’ll post both of those links on our website, RichardHelppie.com. So tell us about Save Our States.

Trent England:

So I created Save Our States back in 2009, really as a side project. I was working in other areas of public policy, some on election law but also on things like government transparency and criminal justice reform. But I had an interest in the electoral college going back to the 1990s when I was in college and just this fascination with an institution that’s so little understood, and I came to believe, really plays a very fundamental role in shaping our politics in creating these incentives that force the national political parties to operate in a certain way that then echoes down through our political system. And so when National Popular Vote popped up in 2006, I started tracking their effort and frankly became very concerned for two different reasons that I’m sure we’ll get into. One I think the electoral college is a better system than a direct election when it comes to the national executive. I think that’s why countries like India and Germany use the electoral college type systems. I think that’s a smart way to elect that particular national officer, but also I think the National Popular Vote plan has some very specific drawbacks that really created a lot of concern for me in my work in other areas of election law. And as I say, I’m sure we’ll get into some of those details. So I launched Save Our States to educate people about the electoral college, and also specifically to explain why I think this National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is really particularly risky. And I think, as I say, I’m sure we’ll explore some of that.

Richard Helppie:

Tell us about your funding sources and what kind of spending you have with your organization.

Trent England:

We’re a non-profit, an educational non-profit actually based at another educational non-profit here in Oklahoma, and our budget on average, it ebbs and flows, but it’s in the hundreds of thousands of dollars-on average, under a million dollars. We did, we made a documentary film called Safeguard, an Electoral College Story over the last year. So our budget probably peaked up around a million dollars to do that project. And it comes from individual donors and a handful of foundation donors.

Richard Helppie:

Gentlemen, this could be a semester long course, and we’re going to try to give the listeners to the Common Bridge most of the information we can in an hour’s time. And indeed when this podcast airs on October 27th, we’re already going to be in a situation where millions of people have cast their ballots, and many others are preparing to cast their ballots. And I think most people understand that the vote that they cast on that date or that they’ve already cast, will be to vote for electors, and that the governors will provide Certificates of Ascertainment, hopefully by December 14th. And then by January 6th, they will be delivered to a joint session of Congress to count the votes and declare the winner before inauguration day. Trent, you believe that the electoral college is a great way to select our president. Why is that?

Trent England:

Well, as I mentioned, other countries use similar systems, I think that’s a good place to start because there’s winners and losers in elections. And that’s the problem right now-it’s not just that the Democrats tend to dislike the electoral college because of these couple of elections, but Republicans tend to dislike the electoral college because of 2016, too. So it’s a partisan issue on both sides, even for a lot of people who agree with me. But if you look at a country like India, both India and Germany created their electoral college type systems in the mid 20th century for similar reasons:  they’re big, they’re diverse. Germany was obviously coming out of World War II. They did not want to create an opportunity for the rise of another Adolf Hitler. India is even bigger. It’s the biggest democracy in the world. It’s very diverse. And by creating a two-step election process, you force your political parties and your national candidates to take into consideration the views of more of your people spread out across your country. It uses geography as a proxy for diversity, which works pretty well because where you live-different states have very different demographic profiles and economic interests. And so the electoral college forces our political parties to be truly national. The Democrats are only a credible political party because they’re already popular in a lot of states. They’re already popular in California and in New York and a lot of places, and they have to then work from there to win additional people over in additional states and likewise for the Republicans. So it creates this incentive not just in an individual election, but this long term incentive to build coalitions. That’s again, that’s why India does it, that’s why Germany does that. And it also, in our system, it allows us to push power down into the states to keep states in control of elections. We never have a nationwide recount. If there’s a problem in a state it’s contained in that state, we don’t have the President in charge of presidential elections, all that power is pushed down into the states. I think that also is really important. So those are the two biggest reasons why I think the electoral college, that two-step democratic system-just like it serves India well and Germany and parliamentary systems well-I think it serves us very well in the United States.

Richard Helppie:

Great. Scott, I know you’ve got a different view and you believe that a National Popular Vote is the way to go. Your group has a means of achieving this change without amending the constitution. Can you explain the method that the National Popular Vote is advancing and why you believe this was a better way?

Scott Drexel:

Sure. Probably one good step to take before that is the why. I think we’re all aware and we get a refresher course every four years as to the fact that the country at large does not elect the president of the United States; that about 98% of resources in terms of candidates and campaign’s time, their financial resources, are spent on winning a dozen or fewer states every year. And the problem with that, aside from the very clear value imbalance that’s placed on some votes versus others, is it has this more insidious, deeply distortive effect on the development of federal policy that goes beyond states that just might want to see more presidential campaign activity. If you look at the way executive controlled block grant spending is doled out, non battleground states compared to battleground states [they] get about 92 cents on the dollar compared to their battleground state neighbors. Battleground states are twice as likely to get federal disaster declarations. They’re more likely to get enforcement exemptions on No Child Left Behind, on Superfund, those types of federal programs. And this is an issue that seems to pervade both sides of the political spectrum. If you look at the distribution of high-speed rail funding under President Obama, or response to the oil spill in the Gulf, it heavily favored battleground states at the expense of more non-competitive states. That’s also been true even in looking at-there’s this article in the Washington Post a couple months back about the original Cares Act. There’s a quote from a White House aid saying, anytime the governor of Florida calls, we listen because we know how important Florida is to the president’s re-election prospects in November. And we see the state of Florida getting everything it asked for and other states struggling for that.

I think one of the things that becomes clear is there’s a calculation that’s going into how that federal policy is developed because certain states carry more weight when it comes to what many elected officials view as their first job, which is getting re-elected. So that’s really the problem we’re seeking to correct, this imbalance of value in a vote in a small red state Wyoming, or big red state, Texas, or big blue state, California, or small blue state, Vermont. The mechanism, the authority to award electoral votes, comes from Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution: if there are fewer more clearly enumerated state powers in the constitution, each state shall award in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct number of electors. Throughout the years, including as recently as a Supreme Court decision in Chiafalo v. Washington earlier this year, the court has reaffirmed this plenary authority of states to determine how those electoral votes are awarded. In 48 out of 50 states today, the winner take all system in which one candidate gets one more, a thousand or a million more votes than the other candidate, they win all those state’s electoral votes and the other candidate gets zero.

Richard Helppie:

Trent, let’s come back to you. And I have a couple of questions. First, why was the electoral college formed in the first place? Secondly, is there a difference between framers and founders, and if the framers and founders were here today, do you believe they would think the reasons for the electoral college would still be valid?

Trent England:

Those are great questions. I mean, obviously when we talk about the framers, we’re talking specifically about the people who created the Constitution. The founders is a much more nebulous category. But we know for the framers, they started off with a parliamentary system. That was, the rough draft of the constitution called the Virginia Plan, was parliamentary. Congress would have elected the president. Nobody really liked that idea. I mean, just a handful of delegates liked that idea, because everybody else said, look, Congress-you’ll wind up having Congress control the president. You won’t have an independent executive. You’ll have the kind of corruption, not necessarily illegal corruption, but just the kind of dirty politics that sometimes take hold in a congressional body that will wind up controlling the executive branch. So they didn’t want that, but they weren’t sure what else to do. They talked about a popular vote. There were some, especially early on, there were some who said, well, we’re just going to have to do a popular vote, that’s the alternative. But they didn’t like that either because of a couple of different concerns, but one of them was this regional issue. They didn’t want a couple of big states controlling everything. They didn’t want the small states permanently frozen out. And so James Madison, at this pivotal moment, stands up and says, look, nobody wants this parliamentary system, we’ve talked about a popular vote. Madison says, look, I like that idea, who doesn’t like that idea? It’s for me-for one thing-it’s easy to explain. It’s easy to understand. But Madison says we can’t do that. Virginia and New York would wind up with all this power. The smallest states would never be listened to. And so we’re going to have to figure out this whole, what would become the electoral college, this two step system. And so we know a couple of things about this system that finally emerged, it was understood to be about representing the states and just like the first amendment provides freedom of speech, but I can’t go into a theater and yell, “fire”, I can’t threaten someone. Claiming that the electoral college provision in the constitution allows states to give away their electoral votes is a real stretch. We know that violates the framers intent. We know that it goes against what, for one thing, they voted that down. They rejected the idea of a National Popular Vote. So to claim that-that power is so clear and so well enumerated -that the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is clearly constitutional, I think we shouldn’t tell people that because frankly, if this takes effect, there’s going to be a lot of litigation. And there is a lot of uncertainty about whether it’s constitutional. And we know that the originators of the constitution, they didn’t want this system. I mean, whether they were right or wrong this is something that they rejected at the constitutional convention.

Richard Helppie:

Scott, there’ve been over 700 attempts to amend or abolish the electoral college. And I do believe it’s arguable, whether it is constitutional or not given, the language about the states can select their electors, but why is now the right time and why is a National Popular Vote the right way to change?

Scott Drexel:

Well, sure. So one of those people who was actually in favor of a constitutional amendment was James Madison. So 1823, years after the constitution had been completed, Madison was in favor of a constitutional amendment that would have barred the use of a winner take all system, which is what we ended up with. I think it’s important and in over the years in conversations with Trent and others, I think we’ve had a little bit of an opportunity to talk about the sort of dichotomy between the electoral college and the winner take all system. Importantly, the National Popular Vote does not abolish the electoral college. That would take a federal constitutional amendment. That much is legally clear. But what National Popular Vote does, is use this state authority to award those electors, but keep the electoral college in place. The winner take all system that we use now in 48 out of 50 States, and again, it is purely a function of state law to use the winner take all system or not. We see in Maine and Nebraska, they actually use congressional district system. So an individual candidate can win one congressional district, two congressional districts and so forth. That system was not debated at the constitutional convention. It is not in the constitution. And in fact, hadn’t really come into prevalent use until most of the founders were dead and buried in the 1830s. In the first presidential election, I believe there were three states that used a winner take all system, and by 1800, all of them had repealed it. So, what National Popular Vote is trying to do is correct this problem that has persisted and evolved over time in which states that are solidly Democratic or solidly Republican are solidly one way, one partisan, has a partisan advantage. And those states have been relegated to the sidelines while this very narrow group of five to 12 States in any given election are wholly determinative of the outcome. So the reason now is the time to fix it, and I would argue that any time prior to now would have been just as viable or reasonable a time to address this, is because in any presidential election, we’re leaving out 80% of the American voting public.

Rich Helppie:

Let me ask you this on the National Popular Vote, that there has to be states and the District of Columbia representing 270 electoral votes. What happens if a state changes their law and withdraws from the National Popular Vote coalition, if I can call it that, or new states enter, and now we have a different count to win the presidency. Does that obviate the entire law?

Scott Drexel:

No. So any state can enter into the compact the same way you exit from the compact. And that is a design feature, not a design flaw. That is the way it was intended. A state can enter into National Popular Vote by passing the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact bill, or they can repeal that bill and exit out of it the same way. The way the bill is, the language is written, if the total number of electoral votes were to increase because new states were were to enter the union, hypothetically the number, it’s a majority of the electoral college is required to trigger the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

Rich Helppie:

So California’s in the compact today, correct?

Scott Drexel:

Correct.

Rich Helppie:

If California said, well, we’re not going to do that. We’re not going to cast our votes based on the results of a national count. We think it’s too big a chance to Republicans win that, we’re not going to do that. Does that obviate all the other states in the compact law?

Scott Drexel:

So in order for the compact to be in effect, the total number of electoral votes represented by States…[cross talk]

Rich Helppie:

You get to the 270, it goes into effect. Someone says, we’re out, now you don’t have the 270, what happens?

Scott Drexel:

Any time that total number falls below a majority of the electoral college, the compact is no longer in effect. And the  existing state law would prevail. So if we went from let’s just hypothetically 270 down to 265, the winner take all system would be controlling. It is worth noting that there is a blackout period in the way that the Interstate Compact is written, so that between July 20th of a presidential election year and January 20th inauguration day of the following year, no state can withdraw with immediate effect. It automatically kicks the effectiveness of that withdrawal to the following year, to January 21st of the following year. So that would prevent any state from, on the eve of the election, deciding it would be advantageous to withdraw from it, assuming they-I would argue not many Democrats were expecting on election night of 2016 for Wisconsin, Michigan, or Pennsylvania to go the way they did. But in any case, the compact itself and the rules of that compact prohibit withdrawal during that six month period.

Rich Helppie:

So that would be an interesting legal case. Trent, maybe you want to weigh in on something that I’ve been thinking about here. It seems to me that if there was a National Popular Vote and it was going to be conducted in the states, all the state voter registration and ballot counting, and those provisions could remain in place. And I, frankly, I could see a state having an issue with the way another state compiles their ballots and the like, but it just seems to me a different way of getting to the electoral college tally, am I missing something?

Trent England:

Well, so there’s a practical, and then a higher level issue with that. The practical issue you alluded to is that right now the electoral college was designed so that each state runs its own election. And, of course, that makes sense, because each state is electing its own presidential electors. I’m in Oklahoma, Scott is in California. California voters choose California’s electors, Oklahoma voters choose Oklahoma’s electors. And that’s always been the way the system was designed to work and is assumed to work. If National Popular Vote ever took effect, then Californians would actually have more power over choosing Oklahoma’s electors than Oklahomans would because there are so many more Californians. We would be pretending like people in all these other states are voters in Oklahoma for the purpose of that one election. That’s a real problem because if Oklahoma, all of a sudden, one day said, you know what, in the panhandle, we’re going to have California style election laws, but in the rest of the state, we’re going to keep our Oklahoma style election laws. Everybody knows-there’s zero question about this-that would be unconstitutional. It would violate the 14th amendment because you have to treat people the same way in the same election. And if California is having a different election than Oklahoma, they can have different rules. The National Popular Vote compact kind of wants to have it both ways, and I think it’s because they have to…[cross talk]

Richard Helppie:

I’m alluding to that some states might have different rules, for example, on whether those incarcerated or convicted as felons can vote and others don’t. And this is a philosophical point about where the votes would go. Now, you gentlemen are both in states that-I think, in Oklahoma is going to go Republican, California is in effect a one party state up and down the ballot. I’m here in a swing state in Michigan. And I was very surprised by the results in 2016. And we’re going to talk about the 2016 election, but frankly, the design of the electoral college to go get a broad base, we had one party that just treated it kind of like fly over country to their detriment. That occurred in 2016, that the democratic candidate only came to the state once and never went to a union hall, here in the cradle of organized labor, the United Auto Workers, and the real blood and sacrifice that was spilled. What about a third way, like a proportional vote or by congressional district versus the winner take all. I’m trying to understand the main objection, the winner take all aspect of this versus the compilation of the electoral college. Scott, is there a difference?

Scott Drexel:

Sure, I think there are many ways, methods that get floated and let’s just take one at a time. I mean, congressional district system has a number of obvious defects. The most obvious of which is you’re opening the presidency to gerrymandering. I’ll give an example, in 2012, I believe, the state of Pennsylvania went to Barack Obama by five and a half percent. Had you been under a congressional district system, I think seven or eight of those electoral votes would have gone to Obama. And 12, 13 would have gone to Romney, despite Obama carrying the state fairly comfortably, so I think that becomes a problematic one.

Rich Helppie:

Isn’t objecting to that actually objecting to the premise of the National Popular Vote?

Scott Drexel:

Not at all. How do you figure?

Rich Helppie:

If this congressional district is voting, and I think the way that these-correct me if I’m wrong-that the proportional votes are by congressional district, that there’s a contest in each congressional district, and then whoever wins the state gets the extra two votes. It seems like you’re counting more and not giving into a winner take all system inside that state.

Scott Drexel:

What we’re trying to accomplish is the person with the most votes nationally wins. So instead of having five to 12 battleground states, now you have 35 to 45 battleground districts. You’ve taken the sort of distilled problem of battleground states versus non battleground states and fractured it a little bit more broadly. So I would argue the problem is equal, but more distributed. On a proportional-and what I’m not arguing right now is the state’s ability to do this, because again, Article 2, Section 1 gives that authority to states determine, hence we have Maine and Nebraska that utilize their systems. Under a proportional system there’s sort of a dual problem. Number one, in order to accomplish roughly the same thing as the National Popular Vote, from our perspective-which is the only way that you accomplish one person, one vote-you would need all 51 separate jurisdictions to do it. Otherwise you’d have some states that effectively lock in where they’re at. They’re a 60/40 state they’re going to stay there. And if we’re the only state that does proportional system, that’s going to be how that shakes out. Once you start getting into-Trent mentioned this quite a bit-the electoral votes aren’t nameless, faceless objects, they are people. So there is no current mechanism for saying this candidate gets half an elector or 0.25 of an elector. So you get into, do you round an electoral vote? So by that point, you’re again talking about a constitutional amendment. So I think of all of the methods that are floated for addressing the system, the one that maintains the electoral college, uses the current structures of the constitution, and uses the state powers in the constitution to accomplish it, National Popular Vote’s really the only one that actually gets there.

Rich Helppie:

That might’ve been a difficult argument to make in Michigan, Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania, but we’ll move along. Look, the country is very, very divided right now. Every single institution, we have elected representatives to the judiciary, the news reporting industry, federal law enforcement, local police forces, social media, all of them have had their integrity challenged. We’ve had our president today make accusations about voter fraud. We’ve all heard him say he would have to wait and see whether he’d accept the results of the election. We’ve had violence in the streets, and we’ve had calls from past candidates for defeated candidates to not concede, unlike in 1960, when for the good of the country, to very hotly contested election that Richard Nixon did concede. Trent, does the electoral college increase or decrease the trust in the voting and maybe some of these divisions that we’ve got?

Trent England:

Well, so I think there are two dimensions to look at. One is when people are not educated about how the system works, then obviously when you have an election, like 2016, all of a sudden you have a trust problem. Not that there’s anything wrong with the electoral college, but if we’re not doing civic education and people are surprised by a result like that, and they don’t understand that the system is working exactly the way it was designed to work, then then you do have a problem with trust. But I think when you look at the electoral college itself, by using state lines, like the watertight compartments on an ocean liner and containing election problems within individual states, pushing the power down, decentralizing it-Donald Trump has almost no power over this election. Barack Obama had almost no power over his re-election in 2012. I think that’s a good thing. And that is a result of the electoral college decentralizing that power.

Rich Helppie:

Think about this in terms of trust though, Trent, if I may. Compare 2000 and ’16, where there was a decisive advantage to the ultimate loser in the popular vote of 2.8 million. Think if you were a person in Carlsbad, California, and you’re watching the outcome of the election, be based around a hanging chad in a liberal district for Pat Buchanan, how are you going to feel about that in terms of trust?

Trent England:

So that’s a good point, but the same thing happens in gubernatorial elections. I mean, obviously I’m on the Republican side of the fence. I used to live in Washington state. I used to live in California for that matter. But in Washington state, there are a lot of Republicans who feel like Seattle does not run their elections in a way that’s honest, or at least verifiably honest. That they act with a very heavy hand in elections and people feel disenfranchised. And so I don’t think the electoral college is unique in that regard. And the real question about popular vote versus electoral college is really just back to question of when we get to the level of having a national election, is it better to have a two-step process? The same thing happened in the last Canadian election, the except flipped the other way. Ideologically, the conservatives won the most popular votes, but the liberals re-elected their prime minister. And that was because the conservatives are basically all clumped up in two provinces and their system says to the conservative party, hey, you’ve got to reach out, you’ve got to win over a more diverse group of people, just like the electoral college says to the Democrats, you can’t be a regional party of the coasts and the big cities in our system right now, you have to reach out and be a more diverse party. And I think it’s a good thing.

Scott Drexel:

Rich, may I touch on that as well? Because I think it’s interesting.

Rich Helppie:

Yes, so I did want to ask you that.

Scott Drexel:

So Trent, it’s funny, I think Trent took an example that I would have looked at somewhat differently, but the same example. We run governor’s elections every year. And in the example that Trent gave, never would you have a scenario in which the city of Seattle cast a minority of votes that overrode the total vote -the total popular vote of the state of Washington. And I think a lot of our problems come from the fact that the person with the most votes doesn’t win. And we don’t have the sort of artificial crises in gubernatorial elections, US Senate elections, statewide elections, in which every vote is equal because there’s nothing particularly special about a vote in Olympia or Spokane or downtown Seattle.

And I think if a lot of the fears that are promulgated about what would happen if you took away the electoral college or the winner take all system, were real, we’d be seeing some of those things play out in the individual states. You would see campaign spending for governors spending all their time in places like Kansas City and St. Louis, but we know that’s not who elects the governor of Missouri. And I think, to the point on trust, it has to-I don’t think there’ve been more divisive moments in the last 50 years of American politics than when two people became president despite having lost the popular vote. There are no other statewide elections in the country, save one or two very sort of obscure examples where that is possible. So I think that has to undermine the public trust. I do agree to some extent with Trent that that’s partially an issue of people not really understanding and being a little bit blindsided by it. I do think it also violates people’s common sense in the notion that each vote should carry equal weight, regardless of whether that person lives in a big city in a rural area, or like two thirds of the country-in a suburb or ex-urb.

Rich Helppie:

And Scott under that type of policy, what would the risks be, for example, a person living in the upper Midwest, and they think they know what’s happening in Portland, Oregon, although most of them have never been to Oregon at all. And suppose that we start getting reports that, hey, there’s been a million illegal ballots cast in one of these more heavily partisan states, and we have a National Popular Vote of some form in force. How would that affect that trust issue?

Scott Drexel:

Well, so I guess what I would-forgive me for resorting to my roots here in answering your question with a similar question the other way. What we have now is a system where when you have five to 12 States that are wholly determinative of the outcome of a national election, anything that happens in any one of those states has this massively amplified impact. So you have a nationwide election that’s separated by 2.9 million votes in 2016, Wisconsin had an end vote total of 17-18,000 votes. So everything that happens in Wisconsin, whether it’s fraud, whether it’s suppression, the impact of that action is amplified beyond what anything could happen in a National Popular Vote. In an election where there’s an analysis today, I think from 538, there are 153 million votes that are going to expected to be cast come November. Voter fraud, voter suppression on the order of tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of ballots, has a far more diluted impact than the super distilled, amplified impact that voter fraud, voter suppression, recounts, anything like that has in these battleground states like a Florida, like a Pennsylvania. So I think what moving to a popular vote does is it alleviates the weighty nature of any individual action in those battleground states in favor of a system where again, every vote only carries the value of that one vote, as opposed to a hyper valuable vote because this particular geographic region is must win.

Trent England:

Okay, can I jump in there, Rich? I think I agree with a piece of that, but I disagree with where Scott finished, because it has nothing to do with the fact that states get a boost from being smaller because they have two votes for their senators or anything. The simple fact is if you have an election and there are three voters and you have another election and there are 3 million voters, the risk of one fraudulent vote when there are three voters is bigger than the risk where there are 3 million. So mathematically, there’s definitely some truth to what Scott’s saying. As the scale of an election increases, the risk from an individual fraudulent vote decreases, and that’s just a function of mathematics.

The problem is where you started with your question, Rich. Right now voter suppression or voter fraud in, let’s use a neutral state, in Missouri, can only affect Missouri. It doesn’t affect California. It doesn’t affect Oklahoma. And this is where the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact has a unique problem. If we abolish the electoral college through a constitutional amendment, I assume that Congress would try to figure this out. But the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact-for it to function-requires every state to take every other state at its word. And there’s literally nothing in the compact that says what to do if there’s a dispute, if there’s distrust, if there’s a real legitimate issue in one state’s election. And so what does Oklahoma do when Oklahomans think that California has not run their election in a fair way? What does California do if California thinks that Oklahoma has not run its election in a fair way? The compact is literally silent on this. And this is a big problem, especially in American politics today, as divided as we are. I mean, this gets into the details, but I just don’t think the compact would actually work as well as the very optimistic and well-meaning folks like Scott, who are advocating for it, think it would. I think it would run into the buzz saw of political reality.

Rich Helppie:

Well, let me go down that path a little bit too, because one thing I’m curious about-the notion of plurality and a couple of things that I thought about that. First of all, historically three top vote getters in 1824, and there were four people vying for the White House. So three went to the House, Henry Clay was a speaker of the House, finished fourth. He used his influence to elect John Quincy Adams over Andrew Jackson and Clay became the Secretary of State. Great historical footnote, I learned that Jackson is the only candidate in history to get a plurality of both the electoral college vote and a plurality of the popular vote and still not be named president. And then I looked to, if there’s no threshold for percentage under a National Popular Vote and I look at some of the early primaries that Donald Trump won under winner take all-22% of the vote winner take all. Could we be in a situation where there is enough division where a candidate with 25% of the vote in the country, that’s the largest vote getter, now this compact kicks in and that person has 270 electoral votes despite having a very thin base of support. Scott, do you want to lead us off on that?

Scott Drexel:

Yeah, sure. I think one of the things I always remind myself when we’re talking about the current system versus  National Popular Vote is-is that a problem under the current system? Donald Trump, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton in ’96, Bill Clinton in ’92, Richard Nixon, 1968. I mean, none-Abraham Lincoln-none of these candidates won a majority of the popular vote. That is a function of our two party system. And we could get into a whole other discussion about the virtues of that. There are people who want to see third-party candidates, that the fact is they haven’t materialized under the current system. And it is just as possible for a third party, fourth party, fifth party candidate to be a disrupter under the current system, as it would be under a popular vote and in some ways, even more so under the current system.

And I think that’s why we saw some amount of anxiety in 2016 as Evan Mullin is going around trying to qualify for the ballot in different states or Kanye West is going around trying to qualify for the ballot in different states in 2020, because qualifying for the right ballot in the right state can have a wholly sort of disruptive effect that if they were able to do that under a National Popular Vote system your candidate still has to qualify for ballots the same way they would under under the current system. So I think the idea that we would be under any more threat of a greater number of presidential candidates or lower thresholds for winning, it sort of flies in face of the fact that number one, it can happen today and it doesn’t happen, and number two we would see it happen-once again, to go back to the example of gubernatorial elections-in an election where every vote matters, we still have a two party system. We’re not seeing gubernatorial candidates win with 15, 25, 30 percent. Candidates win with 45% of the vote-the vast, vast, vast majority of the time.

Rich Helppie:

Trent, any reaction to that, and I want to try to get into some of the more current campaigns too.

Trent England:

Well, I think other countries are a better example. Our elections for governor are informed by our presidential system. It’s not the same system, but the presidential system is at the top and it affects how we organize our political parties. If you look at the last French election, they at least have a runoff there. The National Popular Vote system, the Interstate Compact does not provide for a runoff. In the French first round election, the top vote getter had 24%, less than a quarter. The second place was 21%. Then just behind that with 19.6% or no, 20%, then 19 points. I mean, the electorate was totally fragmented. And I use France as an example because it’s of the countries people think of as democracies, if you leave out Russia and Iran, France is the biggest country that has the kind of system that the National Popular Vote campaign wants us to adopt. France and Mexico would be the big democracies that use that kind of a system. They have very fractured politics and some people think that’s a good thing. I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing, but there is no doubt if you change the top of the pyramid, as far as election rules go, you are going to have an effect that will reverberate throughout the system. And Michael Bloomberg is the easiest example in this election. Michael Bloomberg would still be in it if we didn’t have an electoral college. Again, maybe people think that it would be better if Michael Bloomberg was still running, but it does mean that the winner would have a smaller plurality than even we’ve seen under some of these cases in the electoral college.

Rich Helppie:

That gets us into the parties, and a couple of questions here that I want to try to run through it a little bit more lightning round capacity, that there’s a lot of dissatisfaction with the Republicans and with the Democratic party. And that’s understandably so. Which system would make the existing parties more responsive, and which system would make opportunity for a third party, more possible. Scott, if you’ve got any lightning round type responses to that.

Scott Drexel:

I don’t know, the answers is:  I don’t know. I think it’s sort of speculative and again the example of France is interesting, but in looking at our system and examples of American elections, I think those are more informative. And I don’t think when we have popular vote elections in states-in gubernatorial elections-which in my mind turning a national election using the National Popular Vote is like turning the presidential election into one big governor’s race. All of a sudden, every vote is equal no matter where it comes from. And we haven’t seen, in gubernatorial elections, a proliferation of third-party candidates, of independent candidates. Sure, they pop up, it is routine to see Libertarian candidates taking anywhere from zero to 5% of a vote or Green party candidates. And sometimes they’re taking from one side, sometimes they’re taking from the other, but I don’t think there’s any clear line that can be drawn between popular vote elections and proliferation of third parties and third party candidates. Because if that was the case, we would be seeing it in American public life today.

Trent England:

So I’m going to halfway agree with Scott here, or maybe two thirds. Part of the answer is, it is very hard to say, which is the I don’t know answer-I think is really fair in this regard. And also I think that because of the winner-take-all nature of our political system, up and down the ballot, the development of robust third, fourth, fifth parties is unlikely in either of these scenarios. But I do think there would be a big opening for candidates like a Michael Bloomberg, people who are extremely wealthy, who can self-finance their campaigns, typically that you’re talking about a spoiler campaign or a splinter party. Some of those, if you’re talking about Bloomberg’s level of wealth, you might actually have a legitimate chance of winning a presidential election. So under National Popular Vote, I do think that some of those opportunities are opened up, but I don’t think you’ll see the development of a durable multi-party system. I think that to make the parties more responsive would require changes to campaign finance laws that would make the parties more responsible. What we’ve done over the last 20 years is make it very hard for political parties to raise money, which pushes the money out into the shadows and the periphery of our political system, where there’s just a lot less responsibility. And so we see a lot more fringe actors and that drives some, not all, but it drives some of our polarization.

Rich Helppie:

Well, I think that we could all agree on that. And I think that we’re all looking for an exit from that. Let’s touch a little bit on 2016, and then move to 2020. Some of this might look a little bit like cause versus effect. We all know that the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton captured some 2.8 million more votes than President Elect Donald Trump. The margin for Donald Trump in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania-which was decisive, I believe was around 80,000 votes plus or minus a couple. Clearly there’s evidence that the major parties adjust their attention, their spending, their campaign time, depending whether they think a state is in play or not. So for both of you, is it really fair to say that well, Hillary would have won the presidency under a National Popular Vote or would the Republicans and Donald Trump have adjusted their strategy for that set of rules?

Trent England:

I think you’re right. Nobody can say exactly what would have happened. There may be an advantage to the Democrats under the National Popular Vote set of rules, but that doesn’t guarantee that Hillary Clinton would have won.

Scott Drexel:

I agree with Trent there. I think it’s very easy to go back and look at 2016 and assume because of the outcome that the results would have been the same, even if the process were changed. I mean, if you look at Donald Trump, Donald Trump is from New York. He got 5 million votes-Republican votes-out of California without campaigning really in either. I mean, there’s no question in my mind, he would’ve gotten more Republican votes had he gone to California, he would have gotten more Republican votes if he’d gone to New York. Is that enough to change it? It’s too difficult to say because we can’t see the entire campaign play out. To the extent that there’s any partisan advantage one way or the other, I think it’s probably ephemeral. I mean, at different points in the last 50 years there’ve been Republicans who’ve pushed for a move to a direct election of the president and Democrats have been resistant to it. And it’s been the case vice versa. In 2004, if you flipped 60,000 votes in Ohio, John Kerry would have become the president of the United States and he would have lost the popular vote by a larger margin than Donald Trump did, and I think this is kind of unfortunate. I’m sure blood would have run in the streets and Democrats would have said, absolutely, we’re never getting away from the electoral college. And Republicans would have felt a lot more of an urgency to do it. So I do think it requires stepping back from the immediate reaction of-my side just got steamrolled-and therefore we need to change it and really have the conversation that we’ve been having today. Is this good for the country absent the short-term partisan calculation?

Rich Helppie:

Let me start with Trent, would the concept of a swing state go away under a National Popular Vote?

Trent England:

I think this is another thing that’s a little bit challenging to wrap our minds around, because what National Popular Vote is talking about is a presidential campaign map with no state lines. But of course, that’s not a world in which every voter is treated the same by the campaigns. That world does not exist, unless you’re talking about an election where there’s like, again, like three voters, and as soon as you’re talking about a big electorate, you have limited resources. The question is what would those swing areas be? Who would the swing voters be? Because campaigns are still going to focus on certain people who they think it’s the easiest to persuade to support them, to get out and vote. I think you’d have the country divided up by media markets, and you’d have some very sophisticated analysis of what media markets provide the best bargain to reach persuasive voters. Your cost per voter contact and some measurements of what voters are the most malleable in particular areas. You can’t take the politics out of politics. You wouldn’t have swing states, but you would certainly have that swing areas. You would have campaigns saying, well, we’re going to craft this policy proposal because we think that this is going to boost us by 3% with retirees and we think that puts us over the hump nationally. You’re still going to have politics. But it would be a different world on a national scale. I mean, the whole country is obviously a lot bigger even than our very biggest states. I mean, this would be a big political question for consultants and pollsters.

Rich Helppie:

Scott, does that resonate or do you have a different view on that?

Scott Drexel:

In some ways, yes. I think if you-I hate to keep going back to gubernatorial elections, but there are no lines on a map in a gubernatorial election, but there still are this concept of swing counties where candidates are going to know that the marginal difference there, it might put them over over the top. But I think if you look at the distribution of the country, the top hundred cities make up about 18% of the population nationally and they vote roughly 60-40 Democrat. If you look at the equal-that’s 60 million people, there’s 60 million other people who live in rural areas. So that would be areas that fall outside of any major media market any major MSA. And they vote about 60-40 Republican. The remaining two thirds of the country lives in suburban and ex-urban America. And that really is what is 50-50 in every presidential election. And it’s actually interesting if you go back a hundred years and you add up what the Democratic candidate has gotten versus what the Republican candidates gotten, it comes out almost equally over a very, very, very long period of time. So I think what you would see is you’d see campaigns having to make a different calculation of how they spread their resources. But what you wouldn’t see is entire swaths of the country, where the lights are out, but then other parts of the country where literally one out of every $5 is being spent, which was true in Florida-it’s about a buck and a quarter out of every $5 was spent in Florida alone in 2012. So you wouldn’t see this heavy concentration of resources and time the way you do now. I think you would see candidates that were doing everything they could to drive their turnout in the areas where they’re strong, doing everything they could not to get killed in the areas where they’re weak, and fighting it out for everything in between. But I do agree with Trent that once you take those lines away, it’s a little bit more nebulous. It’s not to say that there aren’t going to be higher areas of focus strategically, but each vote relative to a vote in an urban area, suburban area, rural area carries equal weight. So I just don’t think you see the zero sum game of this vote matters, this one doesn’t.

Rich Helppie:

And that, again may be true on a national level. I know that in Michigan, there’s two things. First of all, it’d be nice if it wasn’t a swing state, because we’d have less commercials. I mean, in 2016 school children could recite the Billy Bush attack ad from start to finish. We saw it an awful lot. And also in Michigan to win a statewide office, you have to do really well in Wayne County where Detroit is, because there’s so much of the population in that particular county. And I understand your statistics, Scott, about a national, but I do think that is that dynamic of the number of people that are in some of the larger states. And I think some of the data that you’ve got on your website helps mitigate some of that concern, but I think people do feel that way as well.

Let’s take a look at 2020, and you guys have been very generous with your time. Lots and lots of forecasts. Wall Street Journal a couple of days ago, had a model on it. Vice President Biden had 104 ways to win the White House. President Trump had 64 ways. And in one scenario, 11 states: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, and Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Wisconsin, and two partial states where the only thing that-those being in Nebraska-were the only things in play, which to the larger point means 37 States are already decided. I’m just wondering when we think about that condition, is that a good thing, that 37 States know who they want to see as the chief executive of the United States, and we’re going to fight it out elsewhere. Or does that mean that we’ve disenfranchised people? And so to put that in a question, is it easier to ignore the voters of a particular state under a National Popular Vote versus the electoral college? Trent, go ahead.

Trent England:

I think under either system, politicians are going to slice and dice up the electorate, and they’re going to have the same amount of resources. It’s not, we don’t think that politicians are going to raise a whole bunch more money if the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact passes. So they’re going to have the same amount of money, it stands to reason they’re going to contact the same amount of voters. It’s just a question of where those voters are. So I don’t think more voters get paid attention to versus being ignored. And it’s a good thing that presidential campaigns can’t win just by running up the score where they’re already popular, just by going to basically one party states and trying to tinker with that system, maybe to suppress the other side’s vote or inflate their own vote. Instead they’ve got to go to these evenly divided places and battle it out. I think in the balance that’s a good thing.

Scott Drexel:

On the one hand, I agree with Trent that we raise all the money we can into presidential elections now. There’s nothing particular about changing the method of awarding electors that changes that. I do think it is easier to ignore a voter currently under the current system than it would be under National Popular Vote. There is zero chance of a Democratic candidate winning, or a Republican candidate losing, the state of Wyoming or the state of-I shouldn’t say state of Texas, at this point, the state of Oklahoma. And the inverse is true in a state like California or Oregon. So I don’t think there is any realistic incentive for a candidate to pay attention to voters there. I think to think of it in another way kind of flies in the face of reality. We’re down to a point where the 12 States where the presidential candidates are spending their time are the states that that will determine the outcome of the national election. The debate is shaped around those states. If you look at where where the presidential debates were being held, where the candidates spend their time, that is indicative of who they have to win in order to become president, and who they’re ignoring is informative of that as well.

Rich Helppie:

Gentlemen, you both been fantastic guests on the Common Bridge, and I applaud the fact that you can get to agreement. And that is what we’re trying to accomplish here. Any predictions on the outcome of the presidential election itself? Trent, do you care to venture a guess?

Trent England:

I think the polls are going to be wrong and I don’t know in which way. But polling has become so much more difficult in the era of cell phones, and we are still digesting, whether from a news media perspective or from a political perspective, what that actually means. So that’s a clever way to avoid the question. I feel like nobody really knows for sure.

Scott Drexel:

I think that the popular vote outcome will be disparate from the electoral vote outcome, in the sense that I think the electoral college will, the way we award our electors, will end up reflecting a much, much, much tighter race, which I think feeds into a lot of the anxieties around how this state’s counting its ballots versus that state’s counting its ballots. I think in all likelihood, the popular vote is going to be fairly wide as a lot of polling suggests. But I think we see at least some semblance of some of the artificial crises we’ve seen in the past, because there are places where methodologies are in question and they can be challenged and that sort of thing. But I do agree with Trent that the same people who are telling you to take this 2020 election to the bank were probably the ones that were telling you the same thing back in 2016. And had you done that, you’d be significantly lighter in the pockets.

Rich Helppie:

Indeed. And I certainly did not see it coming, and this is 2020 so hang on, hang on because it’s going to be a ride. I’d also encourage both of you, gentlemen, if you haven’t already done so read the Transition Integrity Project, which is fairly frightening in the manner in which they would advocate setting aside the actual results of the election.

Gentlemen, let’s wrap up here and Scott, anything that we didn’t cover but perhaps should have discussed. And if you’d like to touch on anything about the best and worst case with either continue with the electoral college, or best and worst outcome with changing to a National Popular Vote, or any closing thoughts that you might have.

Scott Drexel:

No, actually, I think we’ve had a really healthy and wide ranging discussion. As I said at the beginning, the core principle of National Popular Vote is that we have a system that skews both campaign strategy and the way campaigns talk to individual voters, as well as federal policy and the way that develops, toward these highly fraught contests in battleground states while 80% of the American public sits on the sidelines and crosses their fingers and hope everything goes well. Having this debate around whether we would be served better in a system where every vote is equal and the person with the most votes should win, is a conversation that we should be having so that as we go into the next election in 2024, the American people will be looking at two different possibilities:  one, to continue doing things the way we have. To be dissecting things like the Election Integrity Project, where what if the state goes this way, and this was challenged in that court that way, and this state refused to do that, and simply replace that with which candidate won more votes, which candidate had a message that resonated with the 150 plus million people that are voting more than the other candidate. As overly simplified as that sounds, it seems to work really well in virtually every other election that’s run in the United States, and I think it’s an idea whose time has come.

Trent England:

I think the best thing about the electoral college is that right now, it says to both parties, assuming we’re not going to change the rules, if you want to win, you have to reach out, you have to win over people in places you haven’t won before. Whatever people think about Donald Trump, he won because he won states that Republicans had not won in a generation. And he did it by winning over Obama voters. Now, again, whatever anybody thinks about every other aspect of Donald Trump, that is a healthy thing. He actually, his campaign won people over, won states, overbuilt their coalition, and a very different coalition than the Republicans of just a generation ago. That is probably healthy political change. I think that the most frightening thing about doing away with the electoral college through the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is a very unique proposal, nobody had ever considered anything like this before about 2001, is that we would try to have a national election. But the one thing that the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact can’t do is actually create a National Popular Vote. You would still have every state holding its own election, every state with its own set of rules, except that they would all be looking out of the corners of their eyes at every other state, trying to figure out whether they can change their rules to boost whichever side they want to win. I think that it would really radicalize our politics far beyond as radical and unstable as things are today. So that’s my big concern about this interstate compact method.

Rich Helppie:

Gentlemen, thank you so much. We’ve been talking today with Trent England of Save Our States, advocating for the preservation of the electoral college as it exists today, and Scott Drexel with the National Popular Vote, urging that the electors are selected based on the results of the National Popular Vote count. My hope here on the Common Bridge is that we get better behavior from the parties, we get better candidates to choose from, we get more comprehensive policies to address the issues of the day and seize the opportunities of the moment and that someplace in there, we get better reporting from the reporting industry. This has been a very informative day. This is Rich Helppie signing off on the Common Bridge.

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