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Rep. Fitts Calls National Popular Vote ‘Urban Power Grab’

AUGUSTA – State Rep. Stacey Fitts said today that Maine will lose influence in presidential elections if the Legislature passes LD 56. The bill, which came out of the Legal and Veterans Affairs Committee on Jan. 21 with a 7-6 Ought To Pass recommendation, has now moved to the full Legislature.

LD 56 would enroll Maine in the so-called Interstate Compact on the National Popular Vote (NPV). In short, it would force Maine to award all of its electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins a majority or plurality of the national popular vote, regardless of which candidate carries Maine.

Rep. Fitts (R-Pittsfield), the ranking Republican on the Legal and Veterans Affairs panel, said the scheme is “essentially an urban power grab” that would let big population centers chose our presidents.

“With the Electoral College, the influence of small states is magnified, which is why presidential candidates come to Maine,” he said. “Under the NPV, candidates would consider states like Maine irrelevant. They would focus on the 40 largest metro areas, where half the population lives, none of which is in Maine.”

LD 56, sponsored by Rep. John Martin (D-Eagle Lake), proposes that Maine join the compact, which currently consists of five states. Similar bills have been introduced in more than 40 state legislatures. The compact would be activated only when its member states control a majority of the electoral votes needed to elect a president, which is 270 votes of the 538 total.

“This is an end-run around the Electoral College, which has served us well since the founding of our republic,” said Rep. Fitts. “The Framers of the U.S. Constitution created the Electoral College as a way to minimize the risks of corruption, regionalism and back-room politics in choosing the nation’s chief executive. The self-appointed proponents of this thing know they could not pass a constitutional amendment to eliminate the Electoral College, so they are trying this maneuver. They want the big cities to elect our presidents.”

According to Rep. Fitts, the NPV format would be fraught with peril. He said the possibility of voter fraud and stolen elections would increase dramatically. “Under the current system,” he explained, “in order to steal a presidential election, one would have to know in advance which state’s electoral votes would determine the outcome and get control of that state’s electoral process, from voting to recounting. Under the NPV system, one would just have to steal enough votes to make up the margin from anywhere in the country – a significantly easier task. Controlling the electoral process in a single city could be enough to steal a presidential election.”

Rep. Fitts said vote recounts under the NPV system would create “a nightmare scenario” that could possibly require a national recount in close elections, but the NPV sets up no national standards to handle such a situation.

He also questioned voting standards under the NPV. “Ballot access standards are set by the states,” he noted. “The NPV plan does not address what might happen if a candidate wins the popular vote without being on the ballot in every state.

“We also need to consider that voter qualifications vary from state to state,” he added. “By pledging Maine’s electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, we are holding Maine hostage to other states’ standards, which may be more restrictive. For example, if this system had been in place in the 1960s, the electoral votes of northern states would have been tied to the popular vote in many southern states, which still had such restrictive measures as poll taxes and literacy tests.”

Rep. Fitts said the Legislature should reject this bill because it endangers the nation’s election integrity. “America’s success and stability owe a lot to our unique system of sovereign states,” he said. “The Electoral College forces candidates to build broad national coalitions while focusing their messages on the most evenly divided states. It creates incentives that favor unity and moderation, which are prerequisites for safety, freedom and prosperity.”

He added, “I cannot understand why John Martin would want to junk such a successful system and throw our most important election to the party machines and political bosses that control our largest cities.”

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