The Case for National Popular Vote
National Popular Vote would ensure the relevance of every voter in every state in every presidential election. This promise of relevance would empower individual voters and encourage increased voter turnout. It would create an incentive for presidential candidates to campaign for every voter, not just the ones living in battleground states. Presidential campaigns would be forced to run truly national elections and cater their campaigns to the needs of the nation as a whole.
Makes every vote equal. Presidential campaigns are routinely won at the razor thin margins of key battleground states. In 2000, Al Gore was awarded five electoral votes for winning New Mexico by 365 popular votes, whereas George Bush was awarded five electoral votes for winning Utah by 312,043 popular votes. (3) This means that a vote in New Mexico was 855 times more important than a vote in Utah. National Popular Vote would level the playing field and eliminate these kinds of disparities in the future.
Amplifies the voices of rural voters. Political influence in the state-based winner-take-all method of allocating electoral votes is assigned almost exclusively to tightly contested battleground states. This system diminishes the influence of rural states, because most rural states are not battleground states. None of the country’s 10 most rural states are battleground states, and presidential candidates don’t campaign there as a result. (4)
Protects against voter fraud. Because battleground states are well-known to anyone who follows politics, it is not hard to predict where stolen votes will matter under the state-based winner-take-all system of electing the President. These states’ elections can have margins of just a few hundred votes out of millions of votes cast. (5) The current system leaves the door open for small-scale fraud in one state election to swing the election entirely. The amount of fraud required to swing a National Popular Vote election would be so immense that it could not go unnoticed.
Candidates will have to appeal to everyone. The current system allows candidates to run battleground-state-only campaigns that favor the needs of a large minority and ignore the population as a whole. (6) National Popular Vote requires candidates to go after every vote and tailor their campaign for the benefit of all 50 states.