After Stinging Presidential Loss, Popular Vote Movement Gains Momentum in States
Everyone in every state needs to get behind this movement — here in deep red state Kansas my district consistently votes for the Democratic presidential candidate, but with state winner gets all of the electoral votes rules my district’s presidential votes are disenfranchised every presidential election.
John Koza devised the plan and chairs the organization behind it. Koza also co-invented the scratch lottery ticket and taught computer science at Stanford. He turned his attention to the Electoral College, however, after growing frustrated with “winner-take-all” laws.
Koza said the rules are why presidential candidates only campaign in a handful of states. He recognized what might be a potential loophole in the Constitution — that while the Electoral College is in the Constitution, nothing says a candidate who wins a state has to get all of its electoral votes.
“The political power to the choose the president was basically given by the founders to the state legislatures,” Koza said. “And over the years they’ve passed different laws specifying how to allocate their state’s electoral votes.”
In fact, Maine and Nebraska do not have “winner-take-all” systems. They allocate their electoral votes to presidential candidates by congressional district, with an additional two electoral votes going to the winner of the state.
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Colorado state Sen. Mike Foote, who’s sponsoring legislation, insisted that it’s not a partisan response to Trump’s 2016 win. Rather, he said, it’s about upholding the democratic principle of one person, one vote.
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