Rep. David McCrea Agrees to Hand Maine’s Electoral Votes Over to Voters in New York and California
By: David Deschesne
Fort Fairfield Journal, July 3, 2019
FORT FAIRFIELD & AUGUSTA, Maine—Representative David McCrea (D-Dist. 148) recently voted with the majority of his party to approve the so-called “National Popular Vote Interstate Compact” which would arbitrarily give Maine’s four electoral votes for U.S. President to the candidate that receives the majority of the votes nationwide—regardless of how Mainers voted.
LD 816 was the result of years of work by Democrats to force the issue and have Maine join a multi-State compact to change the process for how electoral votes are tallied.
On June 19, 2019 LD 816 failed to pass the Maine House with 69 for it and 74 against it; 7 absent and 1 excused. Some Democrats in Southern Maine did actually vote against the bill their party has so vehemently tried to force on the public.
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is cleverly designed to have the U.S. President elected by a nationwide majority vote, rather than the Constitutionally-delineated Electoral College process. It achieves its ends by retaining the Electors, but participating states agree to pledge them to a candidate based upon nationwide vote numbers, not their home state’s. While the Electoral College, which is Constitutional, would still be in existence in form, its function would be devolved to essentially a rubber stamp for the national vote number—not their respective states’— which is a violation of the spirit and intent of the Constitution.
Under this arrangement, the major population centers in New York and California, along with Massachusetts, Illinois and Florida would be able to combine their votes and nearly outnumber the voters in all the other states in the Union. Since the aforementioned areas are historically liberal, and ceaselessly vote Democrat, this clever move would essentially guarantee a Democrat U.S. president forever, regardless of how the rest of the States voted. For example, in the unlikely event Maine—which generally sends most of its four electoral votes to the Democrats anyway—were to vote overwhelmingly for a Republican or Independent candidate, its electoral votes would have to be given to the winner of the vote nationwide, which would in all likelihood be a Democrat, thus rendering the whole voting process for U.S. President essentially moot since it would be the voters in other states deciding who gets Maine’s electoral votes, not Maine voters.
“If the nationwide vote is won by a candidate other than the one who won in that state, the state’s electors would nevertheless vote for that candidate,” said Kyle Sammin, from thefederalist.com “This would sever the connection between the voters and the electors, disenfranchising the people and jeopardizing the state’s representation in the House.”
The Compact could face some serious obstacles, however, because the U.S. Constitution already details that process and requires a Constitutional amendment to change it—not an arbitrary “multi-state compact” where states merely get together to agree to violate it. Furthermore, the U.S. Constitution also requires Congressional approval for any group of states to enter into any form of a compact. To this date, several states have already joined the Compact but there has been no move in Congress to actually authorize its existence.
Another problem with the Compact is if a candidate wins the National popular vote—a Republican, for example—that the original signatory states do not approve (because they want a Democrat to win) there is no enforcement mechanism in the Compact that would force them to send their electors to the candidate they don’t like. Norman Williams, from Harvard Law Review explains such a scenario in a recent blog; “Suppose that a few of those Democratic-leaning (at least in Presidential elections) states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin join the NPVC, and it comes into effect. Now suppose that in some future presidential election, it looks like the Republican presidential candidate may win the popular vote. In that scenario, there will be overwhelming political pressure in signatory states—which, remember, include heavily Democratic states such as California and New York—to withdraw from the NPVC. To be sure, the NPVC anticipates this problem, nominally forbidding states to withdraw from the compact after July 20th in a presidential election year. But here is the rub: that limitation is unenforceable both as a legal and practical matter.”
Colorado recently became the twelfth state to join the unauthorized Compact. Rob Natelson, a retired law professor at the University of Montana and a Senior Fellow in Constitutional Jurisprudence at the Independence Institute, a free-market, libertarian think tank in Denver, says laws arbitrarily directing electors how to vote are being challenged in several states and before the U.S. Supreme Court. He also points out how the Compact is effectively an end-run around the Constitution “This has never been approved by Congress and there is little chance of it being approved in the near future,” Natelson told vaildaily.com. “Can you really create a situation that changes the Constitution without amending the Constitution? Can they effectively change the Constitution without going through the process?”
Natelson also pointed out some potential problems in the Compact where a candidate among a field of several wins the plurality (the most votes of all the candidates), but not the majority. “What if a candidate gets a plurality in a fractured field, instead of a majority? How they vote in a state does not matter. They’ll be forced to vote for the candidate that received a national plurality, and that gets public legitimacy and acceptance,” Natelson said. “It doesn’t matter what your votes are apart from a large national pool.”
Supporters of the Compact say the Electoral College is outdated and a National Popular Vote would be a better way of electing the U.S. President. Opponents say, rightly, that the Electoral College is more relevant and necessary now than ever before, with the concentrated political power in densely populated metropolitan areas now positioned to outvote the rest of rural America. If the National Popular Vote is arbitrarily enacted, future U.S. Presidents would only have to campaign in the four of five most populated states since the rest of the states’ votes would be meaningless and irrelevant to winning the election.
In addition to voting to authorize the unconstitutional National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, Representative McCrea also joined lockstep with his fellow Democrats in approving LD 1083 to apply the highly suspect “Ranked Choice Voting” scheme to all future presidential elections. Ranked Choice Voting is a convoluted slight of hand scheme concocted by West Coast Democrats and is designed to tilt the odds of winning toward Democrat candidates. In the last election cycle in Maine, incumbent Congressional Representative Bruce Poliquin—a Republican—won the 1st choice slot in the Ranked Choice Voting charade, but eventually lost his seat to a the second choice Democrat candidate after the Vegas-style snapping and spinning of the vote numbers skewed the vote toward the Democrat who ultimately won the seat by the shady vote counting method. McCrea, and many other Maine Democrats hope to expand that chicanery to the Presidential election and—along with the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact—virtually guarantee Democrat wins in perpetuity, thus rendering any opposition to their destructive socialist policies ineffectual and moot.
The two Maine bills do face more procedural votes and tweaking in the House before being sent to the governor to be signed into law.
Maine’s governor, Janet “Big Sister” Mills—who is affectionately named “Big Sister” after George Orwell’s “Big Brother of his dystopian novel, 1984—has yet to sign the unconstitutional Compact into law, but as a good Democrat goose-stepping to her party’s authoritarian government, one-party ideology, she is expected to sign it quickly once it reaches her desk.
After enough state legislatures vote to join the Compact, without Congressional approval, or Constitutional amendment to allow them to, there will undoubtedly be legal challenges both to the Compact’s existence in general and the assigning of electors to the National vote count instead of their respective states’ in particular.
To date, 14 states have joined the Compact (not including Maine, yet).
Regardless of how it all turns out, the Democrat party has certainly outdone themselves in muddying up the political waters in a greedy, self-centered ploy to steal all future Presidential elections and make a complete joke out of the entire election process in the United States today.
