The Heritage Foundation and the State Government Leadership Foundation are hosting an exciting event on December 7 at Heritage on the Electoral College and the proposed “National Popular Vote” (NPV) plan. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (KY) and the chief election officials of five states, Secretaries of State Beth Chapman (Alabama), Tre Hargett (Tennessee), Delbert Hosemann (Mississippi), Kris Kobach (Kansas), and Matt Schultz (Iowa), will discuss the advantages of the Electoral College and the political, practical, and constitutional problems with the NPV. As our Heritage Legal Memorandum explains, the NPV …
While New Hampshire maneuvers to maintain first-in-the-nation primary status, a new Gallup poll reveals many Americans don’t care who New Hampshirites want to be President. In fact, they don’t care who any state wants to be President. A majority of those polled—62 percent—would prefer to amend the Constitution so that the candidate who receives the most votes nationwide becomes President, while 35 percent of Americans would keep the Electoral College. With the spirit of the times supposedly against the Electoral College, why preserve the Founders’ constitutional design? The Electoral College …
The “National Popular Vote” plan (NPV) is a scheme that would effectively abolish the Electoral College without going through the formal (and politically difficult) process of amending the Constitution. The NPV proposes an interstate compact in which participating states agree in advance to automatically allocate their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote (the highest vote getter, even if only a plurality), disregarding the popular vote results in their states. The NPV supposedly would go into effect as soon as “states cumulatively possessing a majority of the …
Another electronic circular with the nameplate ”New Common Sense” burst forth from other corridors of The Heritage Foundation late Friday. This one, again anonymously signed “A Conservative,” takes on the delicate topic of the constitutional authority granted the nation’s president-elect. The e-circular carries the headline “The Presumptive President-elect” and reads as follows: Barack Obama is doing so many news conferences and speeches, not to mention from a lectern with an official seal proclaiming “Office of the President-Elect,” the casual observer may be forgiven for being confused. The United States seems to have …
Over the coming months, we will witness one of the most remarkable aspects of American political life — the peaceful transfer of political authority from one administration to another. Because this is commonplace in America, we tend to overlook the novelty of this phenomenon. However, Americans from our founding generation understood the significance of this fact. Many people have observed, approvingly, that the election of 1800 was the first time in human history that power shifted from one party to another without violence and bloodshed. One woman wrote at the …
