To the Editor:
Re “One
Person, One Vote for President” (editorial, June 22), which urges
New York to become the sixth state to pass a bill that would require a
state to assign its Electoral College delegates to the winner of the
national popular vote:
The National Popular Vote bills are doomed to cause tremendous chaos if
passed. Presidential candidates would mount only national campaigns,
inflating the cost of running and making candidates less responsive to
local concerns.
The bills would also turn the entire nation into a potential “Florida
2000” battleground in close elections. Even in states where a candidate
lost by a huge margin, every vote would need to be examined, a
catastrophic, costly scenario.
It would become possible, in a three-party race, for a candidate to fail
to win even a single state but take the popular vote.
Do we really want to create a system where New York electoral votes
could be determined by voters in Utah or Alaska?
John Cork
Los Angeles, June 22, 2010
Note from KBJ: If Al Gore rather than George W. Bush had received more electoral votes in 2000 (i.e., if the situation were reversed), there would be no discussion of abolishing the Electoral College, much less a push for it. By the way, notice the genetic fallacy committed by the editorial board of the New York Times: The Electoral College has a bad origin ("to appease slave-owning states"); therefore, the Electoral College is bad. I could teach a whole course on fallacies with New York Times editorials.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 