State agreement would bypass electoral college
Rep. Jeff Roorda aims to reform 'mongrelized' electoral system.
Published March 9, 2007
One person, one vote. That's what Rep. Jeff Roorda, D-Barnhart, believes in, and he claims the Electoral College system used in presidential elections undermines this fundamental democratic principle.
"I've always thought a system that gives more weight to one person's vote than another's is contrary to the democratic principles this country was founded on," he said.
The winner-take-all system employed by the Electoral College awards all of a state's electoral votes to the presidential candidate receiving the most votes in that state. This "mongrelized" electoral system is not what the founding fathers had in mind, Roorda said.
"In order to win an election, you should be the guy who worked the hardest and got the best message out to the voters," he said. "We have a lazy electoral system where presidential candidates can focus on a few battleground states and formulate a message that sounds good in those states but is not necessarily good for the whole country."
Last year, Roorda was approached by former Rep. Bob Johnson, R-Lee's Summit, about a bill that would pledge Missouri's electoral votes to the presidential candidate receiving a majority of the national popular vote instead of the majority of the Missouri popular vote.
The bill, which Roorda is sponsoring this year, has been introduced in similar form in 33 other states, two of which have passed it in one House, according to the National Popular Vote Web site.
National Popular Vote is the organization pushing this kind of legislation in state legislatures. The bill would enact an agreement called an "interstate compact" between the states that enact the legislation.
"This agreement shall take effect when states cumulatively possessing a majority of the electoral votes have enacted this agreement in substantially the same form and the enactments by such states have taken effect in each state," the bill states.
If states with a combined total of 270 electoral votes (a majority of votes from the Electoral College) pass this legislation, the president would be elected based on the nationwide popular vote while still using the Electoral College. Therefore, the U.S. Constitution would not need to be amended.
"Almost everybody agrees that passing a constitutional amendment in this day and age is a political impossibility," National Popular Vote spokesman Larry Sokol said.
Sokol said he sees this method of changing the Electoral College as much more plausible than amending the Constitution. He cited a Gallop Poll from November 2004, stating more than 60 percent of the country's voters support electing the president based on popular vote.
"Almost everybody agrees," Sokol said. "The basic premise is the candidate who gets the most votes should be elected. This is clearly something the public supports. We just hope we can get political insiders to see the merit in it."
After the loss of moderate Republicans such as Johnson, the sponsor of the bill in the House's last session, the bill's support has been split across party lines, Roorda said.
He said the bill has a partisan tinge to it because when people think of the popular vote versus the Electoral College, they immediately think of the 2000 election, Roorda said he had hoped a Republican representative would sponsor the bill to help quell party divisions. Even though the Republicans control the House, Roorda said he would continue working for the bill's passage.
"I will say, this bill will be filed every year I serve in the Missouri legislature until it becomes law or until I retire," he said. "Hopefully the former, not the latter."
Sen. Jeff Smith, D-St. Louis, has proposed the same bill in the Senate but was unavailable for comment.
