It is fitting that Maryland is pioneering the effort to create a multistate compact to ensure that the presidential candidate who wins the national popular vote wins the White House. After all, it was Maryland's electoral college system for electing state senators, first established in 1776, that the U.S. Constitution's drafters later used as a model for creating the Electoral College as we know it today.
Last year, Sen. Jamie Raskin of Montgomery County spearheaded the successful campaign to get the General Assembly to become the first signatory on what's known as the National Popular Vote plan.
NPV is an attempt to ensure that the U.S. presidential candidate who wins the popular vote nationally is elected president by the Electoral College.
Currently, in all but two states (Maine and Nebraska), the winner of a state's popular vote wins all that state's electors. If a candidate captures a majority - 270 or higher - of all electors nationwide, he or she wins the presidency.
This winner-take-all system in the 48 states has the potential for what's known as a misfired election, like the one eight years ago in which Al Gore won the popular vote but George W. Bush won more electors, and thus the election. Theoretically, one candidate could win just the 11 most populous states, from California to Georgia, each by a single popular vote, and yet amass 271 electors and win the White House - even if his or her name did not appear on the other 39 states' ballots.
The most obvious way to correct this problem (though not everyone thinks it is a problem) is to amend the Constitution to either abolish the Electoral College or significantly alter how it operates. But passing constitutional amendments is difficult, and most small states are opposed to this change.
Devised by Stanford mathematician John R. Koza, NPV employs federalism, the Constitution's core structural principle, to turn the Electoral College into a de facto mechanism for making the national popular winner the president. How? Because the Constitution grants each state the power to determine the method for selecting its electors - the people who vote in the Electoral College - NPV proposes forming a compact among states to use the outcome of the national popular vote (rather than each state's respective statewide popular vote) as the mechanism for determining which candidate wins the state's electors.
