As a presidential elector, I believe it’s time to change to the national popular vote

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of guest commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

On Dec. 17 I was honored by my DFL Party to join nine other Minnesotans (and 10 alternates) to convene in the quadrennial ritual of casting our votes as presidential electors in a solemn and dignified noon assembly at our State Capitol. The form of this ceremony is prescribed in U.S. and Minnesota law, and was presided over by our Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon. For we electors, it was an admittedly bittersweet experience, and not merely because our preferred candidate, and the one preferred by the majority of our fellow Minnesotans, lost at the national level. I will never stop cherishing the experience, but it also underlined my belief that the Electoral College’s winner-takes-all tradition is deeply non-democratic and should — and can be — changed for the better.

Like most news outlets, the Minnesota Star Tribune carried no mention of this event in the next day’s edition — and understandably so. Like the same assembly in the 49 other states at that hour, there was no real suspense or drama in the one-hour proceedings, and the state and national election outcomes have been known for many weeks. Compared to so many other urgent and timely news items, this was not a significant moment — except perhaps only to us electors and to others in that Senate Chamber, whose presence demonstrated that we honor the procedure under the law.

As Secretary Simon eloquently noted in his introductory remarks, we ten electors were not merely witnesses to history, we were participants in it. For that ceremony, we and 528 other duly certified electors across America were fulfilling a constitutionally mandated function essential to our democracy and the rule of law, regardless of for whom our individual votes were cast.

And it has been so since the exhausted Founding Fathers, after days of debate, hammered out the imperfect compromise we now call the Electoral College (though that phrase is found nowhere in the Constitution) in 1787. Maybe Tuesday’s ritual was boring and anticlimactic to most Americans, but at the risk of sounding grandiose, I and others there felt that weight of history and veneration of our precious democracy more than ever before.

But the time for change is upon us. There is ever-growing support, across party lines, to move to a process of presidential election that more truly reflects what we all want as the ideal for our democratic republic: selection by national popular vote. Secretary Simon alluded to it in his remarks on Tuesday — specifically the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC). There have been more than 700 reform proposals to the way we choose our president through the years. Almost all would require a constitutional amendment, or face serious challenges in court. The NPVIC offers a credible, fair alternative which would confirm the bedrock of a democratic society: one person/one vote.

According to a Pew Research poll in September 2023, 65% of U.S. adults want the president to be chosen by the total national popular vote — including 47% of Republican voters. That latter number has probably only increased, in view of the result of last month’s election. On Dec. 9, President-elect Donald Trump posted the following remarkable statement on his media platform: “The Democrats are fighting to get rid of the Popular Vote in future elections. They want all future Presidential Elections to be based exclusively on the Electoral College!”

While objecting to the generalized accusatory tone of his post, one must welcome its apparent inference of support for the underlying democratic principles embedded in the NPVIC. One now hopes the president-elect will use his persuasive influence with state-level Republicans to advance the progress toward its enactment. Our nation is too great to endure the spectacle of having 90% of presidential campaign expenses and appearances concentrated on seven or 10 so-called battleground states, while the voters and issues of the other 40-45 states and regions are utterly ignored. Without offering an exhaustive analysis of the inequities of the present system, consider this: With a national popular vote, a Democratic vote in North Dakota will have the same weight as one in California, and a Republican vote in Vermont will have the same weight as one in Texas. In 2024, such three-electoral vote states (regardless of current partisan leanings) carry a popular vote advantage over the four more populous states (California, Texas, Florida and New York) with a ratio of 2.44 times their proportion of the population, while the voters in those “big four” states have only a 0.84 weighted share of the total national vote. Your friends’ votes in any of those states should count equally; they presently do not at all.

In 2023, Minnesota took the step in our government to join the NPVIC, bringing the total participants to 18 states with 209 electoral votes. When enough other states also sign on, bringing the total to 270 or more, the compact becomes operative. Unlike two elections in this century alone, the person with the most votes wins. There is no benefit or disadvantage to residents of any state, large or small. For more information, go to nationalpopularvote.com.

With the support of the incoming president and the growing recognition of the anti-democracy flaws of the present system, the serious yet fundamentally ceremonial rituals of last Tuesday will be properly consigned to the past. Minnesota is in. May other states sign on as well.

Corwin Snyder lives in Sauk Rapids, Minn.