 You make sure that I don't forget to go to the podium, oh, no, I think, right. I've got seven, what do you have? I don't have one. My phone. It's seven o'clock. Oh, I don't know. Good evening, everyone. I'm your microphone tester and your host. My name is Michelle Singer, and I'm the Dell Program's coordinator here at the Kelly-Covered Library. And I want to welcome you to this room. We have not been together in this room for three years for this speaker series. So welcome. Welcome to the library. And welcome to the library. We are open after the flood for just a little while. We have electricity, we have heat, and these are not small things. It took us a while to get them. And the library is going to be on a long road to recovery. We see the sign on the basement, the basement's out of commission for a good long while until the spring. So we're really grateful to be here together in this library. We have been collaborating with the League of Women Voters for eight years on this speaker series at the library. And we're so happy to work with the League of Women Voters. We've done a wonderful collaboration over these years. And every year is a great lineup of speakers, and this year is so different. So I especially want to give our thanks to Orca Media for live streaming this event for us today. Hello everyone out there who's watching on live stream. We're really glad to hear it out of you with us today too. Minor housekeeping. There's a restroom. There's some water. Please be comfortable. And welcome to the series. I'm going to have you come up here and give me a proper introduction. I'm Kate Rader with the League of Women Voters. And as Michelle said, we haven't been here for... I can remember the last one we had which was in March of 2020. And up until then we'd have 30 or 40 people here for these events. And that night there were a dozen. So clearly we have to get used to being out in the world again. And I'm looking forward to that day. Our speaker, Tim German, represented Essex Junction as a village trustee and then a state representative for six terms from 2005 to 2016. In 2011, Tim worked closely with Representative Chris Pearson to pass the National Popular Vote Bill in both the Vermont House and Senate. He considers NPV to be of the most important bills passed during his tenure in the House. I have a disclaimer. The League of Women Voters, the United States, believes that the direct popular vote method for the president and vice president is essential to representative government. The League of Women Voters believes, therefore, that the electoral college should be abolished. In 2010, with Chris Pearson's leadership, the League's position was amended to support the use of the National Popular Vote Compact as one acceptable way to achieve the goal of direct popular vote for the election of president until the abolition of the electoral college is accomplished. And so I will let Tim tell you what it's all about. Well, thank you, Catherine. Last week, Chris Pearson called me and I said, oh, I'm excited that you called because I'm going to come down and watch your presentation next week. And he said, well, actually you're going to be doing the presentation. So I guess I'm doing it because old baby boomers are easy to find and fill in. Chris is doing really good work. The reason he can't be here tonight is because he's in Michigan. Chris has been working with National Popular Vote for a long time. And he's traveled to many states, both those who have passed and those who haven't. And Michigan right now has passed a version out of committee and hopefully Michigan will be the next state to pass National Popular Vote. So hopefully at the end of tonight we'll talk about it. Feel free to ask questions maybe as we go through or at the end. I'm pretty informal. I haven't presented a long time. I haven't thought about this stuff in a long time because I've been out of the legislature for eight years. But it did bring back memories just preparing for this. It was an emotional time and an emotional bill and it did raise a lot of passions on both sides. And I will get into the other side because I'm a proponent. Chris is obviously the league is. But there were some interesting arguments made against the whole idea. So hopefully you'll leave and understand that. You can make up your own mind because it's not the law of the land yet. But I will go through where it's at around the country. I want to start with just what did happen in Vermont. I want to start with a video because some of these explanations. This is the governor signing the bill and some of the key players are right there. I'll go through that. But let's start out by looking at the video. National popular bill. I would say for every person who thinks that coming in second should not qualify you to be president of the United States. This is a good thing. Vermont took an incredible step today with the signing by the governor of a bill to join an agreement of states. For the national popular bill where all the votes in all 50 states would be counted. And that's how we would like the president. We're doing everything we can to make sure that we elect the president of the United States of America. Not the president of the targeted states of America. I think this is a win for the voters of Vermont and the voters of the country. Right now we're flyover states. We don't matter. I'm delighted the law passed the national popular bill. I think it will help our state. We're one of 35 states that are completely ignored under the current process. What Vermont has done is they've taken their three electoral votes and they've said, we're going to leverage these votes in a different way than we currently are to make our state more relevant in the national election of the president. I don't think people are waiting up the next day after the election in this state looking for how our three electors are going to cast the vote. I don't want the election in. Who's going to be elected president? We're not left out of the process today because we're a small state. We're left out because we are, in our case, in a safe blue state. But that doesn't mean we get shouted with attention from Democrats. They take us for granted because they know they're going to win. Republicans take us for granted because they couldn't possibly win. Any reminder on the street, if you ask them who is in election, we'll tell you the person with the most votes. And all we've done here is reaffirming that every single vote counts. Every vote will count. Presidential candidates will have to care about the number that they win by in the state. So with a small state for those states, that's going to be a big change. The national popular vote, the strength of the national popular vote, is it makes sure that every vote matters, and it makes sure that the issues that affect every state are going to be important and heard by the next president of the United States. I think it's a good idea because what we're talking about here is one person in one vote. I am not sure that it's a small state, big state issue. It's a battleground state issue. I'm honored to join the other states who have enacted the national popular vote. It simply says, you vote counts. The person who gets the most votes means that's the way it works for every other election in this great democracy and that's the way it should work for the rest of the United States. Okay, so national popular vote, what is it really? Simply, it is a compact of the states to guarantee the presidency to the winner of the national popular vote nationwide. It operates on the principle of one person, one vote. Every vote counts equally, and it gives candidates a reason to campaign in all 50 states. Enough states must ratify the bill until we reach 270 electors. Which is one more than the total number of electors half of 538. So when it started, there was a guy named, is a guy named Dr. John Koza who was started and is still leading. It was a 501C for nonprofit corporation created as national popular vote. And they had been at it very small staff, 10 or 12 now. It wasn't even that many when it started. And they would basically started this whole process knowing that to get a constitutional amendment to abolish the electoral college it was a near impossibility and remained so. This was a way to basically leave the electoral college in place but have a work around so that the electors would be going, have to agree to vote for the person who won the popular vote. Let me talk a little bit about Vermont. Chris and I were on the same committee, the government operations committee in 2007 and 2008. And this was before the vote came. But we agreed on most issues. We were in different political parties. But Chris was the only rep at the time. I'm from Essex Junction. You probably know that we were having a disagreement with the town that we call it a 100-year disagreement. But it finally ended with the village of Essex Junction separating into a city. But it took us many, many, many years to get there. And at the time when I was on the government operations committee we're in one of our merger phases and trying to get the town and village to merge together rather than split apart, which was the final solution. And Chris was always very supportive of my position on the committee. There was another rep from Essex Town on the committee. So we had some very interesting discussions. But I always respected that Chris listened to the issues and really helped me. So we kind of bonded over that issue. So then a couple years later, Chris was still on GovOps but he couldn't do all the reporting of the bill when National Popular Vote came up because he was working for them even then. And that would have been a conflict of interest. And I couldn't do it because I wasn't on the committee. So in that picture you saw one of the reps there, representative Ann Moke of Bennington actually reported the bill for the government operations committee. And it had come from the Senate as a bill called S31. This is in April of 2011. And it did pass the Senate by a vote of 20 to 11. And I will get into later, I want to present both sides to be fair. Senator Randy Brock, who's still in the Senate, wanted... He opposed the bill and he wrote an op-ed that was published publicly in the newspapers. So I'm going to read that to get a flavor because he's very articulate and he gave a good flavor of why people were not in favor of the compact. When it started out it was much less partisan than it is now. There were a lot of Republicans, one of the gentlemen you saw speaking there was almost the head of the RNC, National Committee. And this was seen as a potential to help both parties. To learn more afterwards, I'd say go to National Popular Vote, just Google it. There's a great website on it and it has tons and tons of information. One of which to talk about is what's happened in the past when people who have been elected president, and it's happened five times, were not members or didn't... Let's see, they were not elected president even though they won the National Popular Vote. They got more votes but didn't make it. The most egregious of those cases came in 1876 when the Hayes Tilden, when Samuel Tilden of New York won the Popular Vote but was denied the presidency and that was when a huge debacle happened when the deal was that the Republicans decided to end reconstruction at that point that led to sort of a hundred years of Jim Crow. You will sometimes hear the argument that, oh, the electoral college works pretty well and it's only failed five times, but there's been a couple of major setbacks. And it hasn't all been partisan. Now I think it's pretty clear that most Republicans don't support it and they say that the Democrats are only doing this now because of Bush and Gore in 2000 but in 2004, 50,000 some odd votes in Michigan if they had switched John Kerry would have been elected president over George Bush and lost the Popular Vote by two or three million votes. So it does work. It can work both ways. There's been a couple of near misses. But basically as you heard in the video that most people are saying wait a minute isn't the whole premise of democracy that the person who wins any election wins. So some statistics. Vermont was the eighth state to enact National Popular Vote legislation. I mentioned S31 passed third reading in the House on April 15, 2011. It had passed the Senate first. I actually do think that the Senate debate was a little more intense than the House debate because it was a little more of a foregone conclusion in the House. And now the legislation has passed 19 states and the District of Columbia. That represents 205 electoral votes. And remember they have to get to 270 for it to go into effect. So Minnesota is the most recent state that happened in 2023. Nevada also is about to come in but they have a long process with constitutional amendments and that will probably be finalized in 2025. So Popular Vote needs only 65 electoral votes to go into effect. And as I mentioned Chris is in Michigan now trying to get their total up and I think that would get it to 220. And so it's pretty soon that it's going to start. There was a law for a couple of years and now I think it's starting to get back into the national consciousness. There is a path. You go on the website you'll see that there's a path that they lay out to get to passage by 2028, hopefully for the 2028 election. I think that's wildly over optimistic given the lack of bipartisanship right now. But it's possible. National polling 65% of the people support in the countries support National Popular Vote. I mentioned it started as a non-partisan effort. There are Republicans on the board still. New York, for example, was a red state with both houses controlled by the Republicans when National Popular Vote passed there. It has passed in 17 states and one chamber in eight more. So Arizona, Arkansas, Maine, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Oklahoma and Virginia has all passed one state. So they're all in the mix of places that I think the theory is that if the Democrats turn the tide in those states there'll be a good chance for passage. As Catherine mentioned, the League is a key partner in many of the states here. Now what will happen if we get to the 270 or more at some point? I think the theory is that the compact would not necessarily need approval from Congress or vote in Congress because the states have responsibility for how their electors are chosen now have since the Constitution was put into effect. I think as a practical matter it's always been expected that you would go to Congress for a vote because of something of the magnitude of this change. So hopefully it would get over 270. I think the theory is also that once enough states were in to get over 270 electoral votes the rest of the states would just follow through similar to what happened in the constitutional amendment for women voting rights in 1918 which by the way Vermont was supposed to have been the state that put it over the top and we had a governor at that time who didn't do that so Tennessee got the glory. I'll take some questions now because I do want to read what Randy wrote in 2011 and I think it's interesting to give people perspective who are saying well this is a big change, the electoral college is a very complex thing nobody really understands it and nobody's really going to understand this either because what would happen in Vermont is my partner Martha and I were both electors in 2016 and we met after the election and of course we were casting our votes for Hillary Clinton and we won the Vermont vote in the general election didn't win the primary but won the general election here so Vermont's three electoral votes by our three electors voted for her that went to Congress and that's the way it worked in almost all of the states, Maine's a little bit different but 48 states it's winner take all Hillary beat Trump here that's the way it would work let's take that same election and say what if national popular vote had been in effect and let's say well no this is the real case Trump won the election let's say he won the national popular vote we would have had to vote for Trump if we were the electors that year if Trump had won the popular vote we would have had because we had agreed to this compact we would have voted for the person who won the national popular vote so that in that case that hypothetical it would have been Trump so that would be very different I think what would happen in reality and Chris could may have a very different view of this is that if Vermont because we're a flyover state and a very safe blue state if we voted for the Democrat but a Republican one like in that example my guess is that we would under the compact probably we would still choose the electors but my guess is that we would choose members of the other party because the votes were going to be cast for the president in the other party I don't know exactly how that would work that may be confusing but it would be hard so I just assumed to give up my electors spot well I think you know Vermont the one great thing about the state still is that having been in the legislature we have a congeniality here that doesn't exist in congress at all anymore it's just sad to watch but we have vehement disagreements as legislators but we all still I think there's a congeniality that we're all in it together and we all trust at some level that everybody's trying to do the best for everybody so that would be my guess is that you would defer if you were as part of the compact we're having to vote for somebody from another party either way that we would probably defer and elect other people but we wouldn't have to we could just do it there's a whole other issue of faithless electors and what would happen if in states okay there's no questions now let me read what Randy wrote because he gets at this issue a little bit and it's something to think about he wrote an op-ed in 2011 before the senate voted on the bill and he said proponents of the national popular vote claim that 73% of Vermonters favor it but Vermonters haven't been asked the right questions the question should be do you favor having the value of your vote for president cut in half do you favor having your vote for president cast for a candidate who was rejected by Vermont voters do you favor making an end run around the Constitution because you think you've found a loophole that lets you get away with it just a few short weeks ago 180 members of the general assembly student took a solemn oath never to vote for any bill that lessens citizen rights and privileges under Vermont's Constitution but today despite that oath legislators are poised to pass a piece of legislation that will do just that the bill is the so-called national popular vote its purpose is to ensure that the winner of the popular vote is elected president of the United States its designed to address situations like the Bush Gore election of 2000 when the winner of the popular vote lost here's how it would work Vermont would enter into an interstate compact with other states that have adopted the NPV once there were enough states in the compact to represent the majority of the electoral college all of the compact states would cast their electoral votes for the winner of the national popular vote in all 50 states and the District of Columbia the NPV winner would thus automatically win the electoral college and the presidency at first blush the goal of the NPV might seem reasonable but there are three major problems the framers of the Constitution recognize the need to balance the urban and the rural big states and small states the strong and the weak the elegant design of the electoral college was part of that balance Vermont has three electoral votes one for each US senator and member of Congress there are a total of 538 electoral votes 270 are needed to win that means that Vermont represents about 0.6% of the electoral college but Vermont has only about 0.3% of the nation's voters thus today Vermont's votes are worth twice what they were worth should NPV become law it's great for New Jersey, Massachusetts and Michigan it's bad for Vermont, Wyoming and Alaska also if NPV had been in effect throughout Vermont's history Vermont's electoral votes would have been cast for someone who did not we did not vote for in 19 of the 55 presidential elections since Vermont joined the union in other words in 35% of presidential elections our votes would have gone to someone the majority of our voters rejected at the poll okay I won't read the rest because that's pretty much what he's saying so he's right that yes there would be a lot of elections when we were on all Republican state and whenever a Democrat like Grover Cleveland won the presidency it would be somebody we didn't vote for so that is true that's what the national popular vote could do in every state at different times we considered these arguments in the house when we voted and one of his concerns and I say his concerns but these were concerns among others in the state when you are going about 0.6% of the electoral college and 0.3% of the nation's voters that just and the argument of that you were taking your influence in half the question really is at that smaller percentage what influence are we talking about Vermont and the other small states are pretty well split nationwide between Republican and Democrat and presidential elections we're all flyover states we're all taken for granted we are none of these states are up for grabs in national election and if you go on this website and just again national popular vote there's a lot of information about all of these sort of they call them myths about what would happen if national popular vote came in the truth is we never get a presidential candidate during the election neither do any of the other New England states except New Hampshire because they're a contested state so the same thing is true in the west with Wyoming and Montana and the states that don't have a lot of people they're so solidly Republican that they haven't seen presidential candidate it's really stunning all the things that we all know that this whole election now is in between five and ten states nationwide the rest of us are just bystanders to the election in my view national popular vote changes all that you have to go to you may not go to every state if you're campaigning but you certainly have to care about the number of votes even in Vermont for our small number of voters your majority matters because every vote is going to count nationwide every votes going to be equal right now with these big states accounting for everything their voters have so much more influence than anybody from the states that don't matter because of the winner-take-all rule it's pretty amazing that millions of voters like in California for example it's winner-take-all if you win by one vote in California you get all the electoral votes and there's been a lot written too about the electoral college some people are leery of this just because it's a big change and we've been doing this way for 200 some odd years there's a lot of literature about even even at the beginning yes it did favor small states I mean even Vermont when we were in the top four first 14 we had six or seven electoral votes because we had six congressional representatives at one time we just got whittled down because of population over the years to our one now but we always had two senators so even if you conceded that it made more sense to protect the small states like Rhode Island and Vermont back then when there were only you know 15 or 16 states it's very different it's been changed over time so that is some of the arguments that were used against National Popular Vote they didn't carry let me be here in Vermont on April 14th the vote in the house on second reading which was the important vote was 85 to 44 and it was curious that there were 21 people absent that day for the yes votes the 85 there was one Republican rep who voted for it and surprisingly for the no votes there were five people on my side they all have the Democrats who voted against it and there were very few a lot of times after a vote is taken by roll call they have what's called voter explanations and people can stand up and if any of you follow it recently but voter explanations had become very much overused they're supposed to be very short statements of feeling and not a repetition of debate on the floor but they've become because I think it really happened when Vermont Public Radio started live streaming the debates in the house things changed overnight and people started making comments to get on the six o'clock news that night it was comical to a lot of us at the time particularly those who didn't who thought we weren't doing that but anyway there was one vote explanation by a friend of mine Mike Marwicky who's still in the house and he got up on the floor and he said I voted yes to upgrade and modernize this elective process and my daughters would be sure to remind me that this isn't just about one man one vote but also since suffrage was passed it's also about one woman one vote so he was a little bit ahead of his time on that one and the representative from Stowe got up and sort of parroted what Representative Senator Brock had said that I asked the question during the debate why we would give up half of our power or advantage and didn't get a good answer so she said so I voted no but as we've seen the took me a while to even understand with that 0.6 of the electoral college how that manifested into twice as much influence as the fact that we only had 0.3% of the nation's voters but I think I still don't get that one but anyway so that was the debate and that was the vote and we were the eighth state and I personally think that at the time was very important to me I don't think even among Democrats at that time they thought yeah this is a good idea but we're so far away from this this is going to take forever and you got to get all these states in but it has been chipped away at over the years and people like Chris you know go around to all the states and they talk to both parties I mean it trying to make it very nonpartisan and so hopefully if there's a path we will eventually get there and get a vote from Congress so that it's understood and if it was working for several years and people finally understood that yeah the winner of a vote ought to win the election that they would do that so what I would like to play is there's some of the other important questions about national public vote are addressed in oh did it turn off? So you keep talking while I do this. Okay well let me again are there any anybody have any questions about oh go ahead If Congress did not approve this being when the presidential election comes to them aren't they going to have some people saying oh this state voted illegally don't count it? I'm sure they would. I'm sure there would be so much legal action. This is unknown at this point. I think when some of these things are originally discussed about how it would be implemented we didn't have the dichotomy. Politics wasn't like it is today where everything is contested so my guess is that yeah there would be court cases in front of this if Congress was asked to do this and one of the parties decides this is the end of us because people are actually going to every vote is going to count can't have that. So I don't know exactly how it would play out but my guess is there might be another drawn out process. There are others who just say don't need you know could come to the politically to the point of saying we don't need Congress at all. It's very clearly this is the states and you're the ones who are always talking about states rights now we're agreeing with you. The states have voted to do this we're going ahead but then yes it has to come back to be ratified by the Congress in the end. So all good questions and all good questions that will have to be run through the political meat grinder. Yeah let's take a few other questions first. In your opinion what is the single most logical reason against the national vote or what's the most downside and what's the worst of the downside of going to the national. To me there isn't but it does chain out to other issues to me like for instance it's the idea of the person who wins an election wins. We are chipping away at that because like in Vermont in some places now we have not instant runoff voting. Ranked choice voting well theoretically in a ranked choice election the winner doesn't always win. This is a famous case in Burlington where the winner the person who won the popular vote in the mayor's election when Bob Kiss was elected. Kurt Wright wasn't elected mayor because they pulled they put the third place finisher off and then he no longer had the winning thing. Personally I don't think there's a right or wrong way there's a lot of different election systems like another for instance in Vermont. Chris Loris in Rutland who he served in legislature with me he and David Lair sat right behind me and they were both mayors of Rutland. When Chris was elected mayor of Rutland he got 31% of the vote and a lot of people said well that's just not enough of the electorate to have a mandate to govern. So if they had had instant runoff voting he wouldn't have won that may have not won in that election. And a lot of people say oh if you elect if somebody can win with 17% of the vote you'll get 20 candidates and it'll just be this crazy free throw and nobody understands it. So you have to think through all of these election issues and it's difficult but to me there's no real downside because in a national election in my view my vote should count exactly the same as somebody from California New Mexico. There's no difference and that's the only way to do that right now. This is huge disparity of you know what a vote is worth around the country and the election plays out. Well you'll see let me start this because it starts with somebody you may or may not agree with a lot of things. This is a very presidential candidate Scott Walker summed up our current system of electing the president by saying this is a whole election. Governor Mitt Romney said this video explains why more than three quarters of the people of the United States are politically irrelevant in general election campaigns. This is the gentleman who started NPV. Every voter in every state relevant in every presidential election. The National Popular Vote Bill would guarantee the presidency to the candidate receiving the most popular votes in all 50 states of the District of Columbia. The president of the United States is elected by 538 presidential electors. The Constitution lets each state choose the method of selecting its electors. Today 48 states use the so-called winner take all law that awards all the states presidential electors to the candidate who gets the most popular votes inside each separate state. For example because Obama received a million and a half votes in Minnesota and Romney got only a million three all 10 of Minnesota's electoral votes for president were cast by Democratic electors. Because of state winner take all laws five of our 46 presidents have come into office without receiving the most popular votes nationwide. This occurs when a candidate wins a couple of states by a small margin while losing the rest of the country by a large margin. For example in 2016 President Trump won Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania by a total of 78,000 votes thereby winning a majority in the Electoral College while losing the countries by 2.8 million votes. Each of these 78,000 voters was 36 times more important than the 2.8 million voters elsewhere. Similarly 537 voters in Florida in 2000 were 1000 times more important than 537,000 voters elsewhere in the country. Near misses are common under the current system. A shift of 60,000 votes in Ohio in 2004 would have elected the second place candidate despite President George W. Bush's nationwide lead of 3 million votes. In 2020 if fewer than 22,000 voters had changed their minds in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin. Joe Biden would have lost in the Electoral College despite his lead of over 7 million votes elsewhere in the country. Each of these 22,000 or so voters was 329 times more important than the 7 million other voters. Because a few thousand votes in any one of the dozen closely divided battleground states can decide the presidency. The Winner Take All system creates unnecessary recounts, hair splitting lawsuits, judges deciding elections and reduced confidence in elections even when the choice of the nation of 158 million voters is clear. Moreover the outsized national impact of a few thousand votes in battleground states virtually invites foreign interference in our elections. In a nationwide vote for president, every vote will be equal throughout the country. State Winner Take All laws have other inverse effects. Neither candidate has any reason to campaign in any state where he's safely ahead or hopelessly behind. For example, the only states that received any general election campaign events in 2012 were the 12 states where Romney's support was at a narrow range between 45% and 51%. 38 states were ignored, including 12 of the 13 smallest states in almost all rural, agricultural, southern, western and northeastern states. 23 relied on the Republican states were totally ignored by both parties, as were 15 Democratic states in the District of Columbia. In 2016 virtually all general election campaign events were in 12 closely divided states where Trump's support was between 43% and 51%. Similarly, virtually all campaigning in 2020 was in the 12 states where Trump's support was between 46% and 54%. Battleground status is fickle and fleeting and voters in Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina and Pennsylvania were virtually ignored in 2012 because their states weren't particularly close that year. But there's more at stake than whether babies don't get kissed in the states that get ignored. In his book Presidential Poor, Dr. John Hudeck of the Brookings Institution documents how battleground states received 70% more presidentially controlled grants, twice as many disaster declarations, and considerably more superfund than no child left behind exemptions. The Small Business Administration's largest loan in history was to a Dakota cheese factory described by President Obama as, quote, the tastiest investment the government has ever made, unquote, located in, you guessed it, Ohio. Meanwhile, Professor Douglas Priner and Andrew Reeves show how the interests of battleground states shape innumerable government policies, including steel quotas imposed by the free trade president from the free trade party. Even travel by sitting presidents and cabinet members is skewed to battleground states. Indeed, flyover states are so irrelevant that presidential candidates don't even bother polling them to see what issues might be of concern to their voters. As a former White House press secretary said, quote, if people don't like it, they can move from a safe state to a swing state. Fortunately, thanks to the National Popular Vote Bill, people don't have to move to another state in order to make their vote count. Now, the cause of all these problems, namely the state-by-state winner-take-all method of choosing presidential electors, is not in the Constitution. It was not debated at the Constitutional Convention and was never mentioned in the Federalist Papers. Only three states used winner-take-all in our nation's first presidential election in 1789, and all three repealed it by 1800. It was not until 1880 that winner-take-all was adopted by all the states. These state winner-take-all laws can be repealed in the same way that they were originally enacted, namely by passing a different state law. In the leading case governing the selection of presidential electors, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the choice of method belongs exclusively to the states. As of 2020, 15 states and the District of Columbia have enacted the National Popular Vote Bill into law, including four small states, eight medium-sized states, and three big states. Moreover, one legislative chamber has approved the bill in nine other states, including a bipartisan 28-18 vote in the Republican-controlled Oklahoma Senate and a bipartisan 37-21 vote in the Republican-controlled Arizona House. The National Popular Vote Law will take effect when identical laws are enacted by states possessing the majority of the electoral college, that is 270 out of 538. After taking effect, every vote will be equal throughout the United States, thus making every voter in every state politically relevant in every presidential election. All of the presidential electors from the enacting states will be supporters of the candidate receiving the most popular votes in all 50 states in D.C., thereby guaranteeing the presidency to the candidate receiving the most popular votes nationwide. In a nationwide election in which every vote is equal, candidates will have to pay attention to the concerns of voters in all 50 states. The National Popular Vote Compact is a constitutionally conservative, state-based approach. It does not alter the Constitution and does not violate the Constitution. It retains the electoral college and state-controlled elections. Additional videos discuss various specific aspects of the National Popular Vote Compact. Learn more at nationalpopularvote.com and from the book Every Vote Equal, a state-based plan for electing the president by National Popular Vote, which can be rather downloaded for free or purchased from Amazon. Please use our convenient email system to ask your state legislators to support the National Popular Vote Bill. The title of the text is one-top. How about that? Do we have till 8, Catherine? Is that how we do it on time? Okay. Any questions based on that? That was pretty good. He covered a lot of other topics that come up in questions. If we have a few minutes, I have a question because it's related to this. It has to do with New England and New Hampshire. Some of you may know that the Democratic National Committee every four years determines and makes changes to the presidential primary system. This time around, both Iowa, which had a caucus, was moved, not allowed to go first as they had been. New Hampshire also was replaced as the number one state in favor of South Carolina. There was a lot of politics involved. A lot of that comes directly from the president. But what's happened is, even for this next election, President Biden has said he's not going to compete in New Hampshire. So now there's a big thing. Well, are we going to have a right-end candidate? I think the only two candidates right now are Kennedy and Williams. I always have trouble remembering her name. If New Hampshire goes ahead first, which they will go ahead first this time against the wishes of the DNC, because they have a Republican-controlled House and Senate, and by law there's a state law in New Hampshire that they have to go first. If they do that, there's a possibility that their delegates may not be seated at the convention. Okay, that's 2024. What happens in 2028? One of the problems with both New Hampshire and Iowa, there was a lot of criticism that they don't reflect what America looks like. In our case, in Northern New England, we're all between like 92 and 94 percent white states with very small minority populations. Anyway, so that is going to be somewhat contentious in 24, but in 28, some of us in New England have said, well, how do we fix this problem next time? Because it may not, New Hampshire may still be controlled by Republicans and not change it, and still be sort of recalcitrant to not have their number one status even among the Democrats. So anyway, so there's been some thought, well, what if New England got together and decided, maybe not the first, but maybe the second or the third, to have a regional primary, sort of a New Hampshire forward primary, because they're still the only contested state in the region. But if we all banded together and candidates had to come there, it's very easy. You could do all six states in a day, which they don't even bother to do now, they could. It's quite remarkable to me that people can't even cross the border. They're in New Hampshire all the time. They can't even come into West Lebanon, I mean, into White River Junction or farther north, or Springfield. So my question is, how would people feel about if there was a New England primary, each state could be invited to participate. From now on we'd have to make some changes. We would have to go off town meeting day probably. Let's say that it was moved forward. Right now we're in March. We're part of Super Tuesday, which is a whole bunch of states, and they've been trying to whittle down the number of states. Rhode Island just got some benefits to get off of Super Tuesday and go a little bit later. But it's easy for Rhode Island to change. Long story short, Vermont would have to decide to move its primary. The legislature would have to vote on that. And we could do it beforehand. And that would mean we'd finally get some attention because as a little state, there may be candidates out there who look at Vermont and go, they're not like Massachusetts and Connecticut. We seem to remember that senior senator who's a little bit different from the rest of the Democrats. And, you know, maybe I could think of a few people who might say Vermont would be a very good state to come in and campaign and start to bring other candidates in. And for the rest of New England, Connecticut had tried to take New Hampshire's spot too. They didn't get into that first tranche of primaries. But it's an intriguing idea that some of us have been discussing in New England about what if we all did it? And then all the TV would be cheaper. A lot of people who don't have a lot of money could run because you've got these television, when you pay for television in New Hampshire, half of it's coming into Vermont and Massachusetts. Anyway, so I'm curious about what people might think about that idea. And how would you feel about having to go to, if you, on town meeting day, but having the primary on a different day, would you care? Okay, sure. Good thing. But these are some things that some of us still try to think about what's the best. And it's also good for the other party, some of the same concerns in all these states. There's a lot of money involved, and it's good for the economy. All the states that right now, the amount of money that flows into the contested states that are battleground states is just phenomenal. And there was no, I don't know if he just showed that, but there's a tremendous, there's another stat that money is that flow into states that are potential battleground states. No matter who's president, they load up these states with as much money as they can for self-interest. Sight shows how it compared the amount of money that's spent in, they used Ohio for an example where the argument I think that Randy Brock had was the rural people don't get the same amount of attention or whatever. Anyway, it balances out really well. So the money that goes into the big cities deals with a certain percentage of people, voters, and the percentage of that money is just about equal. And it's the amount of money spent in rural areas, sort of a per capita thing. Again, it all balances out in the end. So I think that the idea of advertising and going back to the national popular vote, the idea of advertising, the criticism that the advertising only goes to certain population centers is not quite true. It does balance out in a pretty good way. So that to me is helpful in the argument for the national popular vote. Everybody gets touched. That's where I don't understand why there would be a difference between Republicans not supporting it, Democrats supporting it. I don't know if that's across the board, but they all are spending that money in these battleground states and all the resources are being focused in them. It's not going to be different for either party. So I'm trying to understand why there's a difference. I think part of that is gerrymandering that changes the picture of the state congressional elections. And we hope to have talked about that in February or March at our program here. But I think you're right, too, that I've never quite understood why it's become such more and more partisan, just like that everything has. And yes, if I'm in a flyover state that's a pretty big state, it doesn't matter what party I'm in. I've got a lot of business people and restaurant owners that I'm trying to support who are going to support me. They're not getting anything now and they're watching the state right across their border. I mean, Pennsylvania, they're just showered with everything and everybody around them, not so much. So it is a good point. That would be it, but for both parties, those are issues that get discussed a lot. Just how do you do these primaries and when do you do them? Because if I'm just not a self-funded billionaire, it's really expensive and that's one of the ideas. The idea of regional primaries has been around for a while. They just haven't pulled it off yet, but that is a way to save on travel, save on media, all that stuff. So both parties might wind up doing that more and more if it was national popular vote because you need, you've got to at least drop your plane wheels down pretty much in every state because people care that you came just like house races in Vermont. Did you come see me? I mean, I used to get that all the time. So I do think it would encourage that. National popular vote. If that's approved by enough states for 270, and here's the election, among those states that have approved it, they go strongly this way. But the other states went strongly the other way. The national total is against what these states have approved. Do you think they would actually vote for the national total or for their total? I think there's different. One school of thought is that once it reaches 270 or a little more, all the other states will just join because why not? They're going to be in the minority. Whoever gets the 270 first is going to win the election because the electoral college is still there. So that could be one of the things where some states just like accepting Medicaid over our dead bodies, we're just not going to do it and we'll just accept the consequences. I'm not suggesting it's going to be easy or within one election cycle be totally accepted by everyone. Past in one house, I think in Virginia. So yeah, I think there will be a renewed push there. I don't know how the governor feels about it because he could veto the bill so that you don't know. When the numbers are right, what happens with Congress? How does Congress come to play in it? You said something about it. Well, right now when we meet as electors saying Vermont and our three electoral votes go, it's that thing from last time where the vice president gets all that information. January 6th. January 6th. Declare the winners. When it reaches 270, what happens next? How does Congress get involved or not? Because Congress, the electoral college is still there. Congress would still have to meet as they do now and see how many electoral votes each person has. Now, the winner of the national popular vote is going to have the requisite number of electors to win the election and they have to certify that. And that will be illegal. I was going to say about if the states all do this, there isn't any procedure where Congress says, okay, we're going to go ahead and do this. They just, it just happens. Well, the vice president, like, that was the whole. Yeah, but Congress can't say to the states, we can't do that. I guess that's my question. I thought you mentioned earlier that there might be some. Well, I do think that will be a whole, that's a whole new issue that we haven't seen yet. Because of the whole thing about fake electors and, you know, the states can throw out the vote in their state and just elect their own electors and, you know, go on their merry way. Some people are going to say, well, wait a minute, you know, that effort probably won't go away to corrupt even this new system where the states have already agreed. But then some states say, well, wait a minute, we, you know, and you, I guess is there'll be some states, there'll be a move to repeal. I don't think there may have been one or two so far where once this gets really close, you know, and you really don't, people, some people really don't want it. They'll probably go back to some states and say, let's repeal that law that we, like, hypothetically in Vermont, you passed that 2011, things were different then. We didn't know then what we know now. You know, this is bad for Vermont. We want to go back to 0.6 instead of 0.3. I don't know. Any other questions? This has been fun for me. I always, every time I, every time I look at stuff, watch this stuff, it was always a learning experience. And I'm sorry that Chris couldn't be here because he could answer the questions a lot better than I could. Maybe you can come to another one in the future. People have more questions, but he's been doing a great job. So it's been really great. I'm really glad that somebody from Vermont's been able to be at the table on a lot of these discussions and well respected around the country. And it's been great for Vermont. Thank you everybody for coming out and I hope you'll come out again in December, December 13th, when we'll be talking about how we can talk to each other without getting into a nasty fight. Constructive discourse is the name of the thought. Thank you. That's why I just needed the name because I didn't know how to use it. The second Wednesday.