VA Mercury Richmond – A state Senate committee on Tuesday voted down legislation to add Virginia to a coalition of states trying to do away with the Electoral College, delaying an ambitious and hotly debated proposal dealing with how the United States will elect future presidents.
The Senate Privileges and Elections Committee voted 14-1 to push the bill to the 2021 session, ensuring Virginia won’t join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact before this fall’s presidential election.
Some legislators on the Democratic-led committee signaled they were open to the idea, but said the legislature needed more time to fully consider it.
Sen. Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, said the Electoral College was conceived at a time when fewer than 50,000 people were voting, adding that he believes the system had “racist origins” meant to enhance the political power of slave-holding Southern states.
“It is a system which no longer should have any bearing on us,” Surovell said before the vote to delay the bill. “But I understand that undoing the Constitution is really hard.”
Sen. Janet Howell, D-Fairfax, was the only member of the committee to vote to keep the proposal alive for the current session.
The bill — which had already passed the House of Delegates 51-46 — would have added Virginia to the movement of states pledging their presidential electors to the candidate who wins the most votes nationwide.
Under Virginia’s current winner-take-all system, the state’s 13 Electoral College votes go to the candidate who gets the most votes from Virginians.
The General Assembly, under full Democratic control for the first time in decades, is passing a variety of measures designed to make it easier to vote in state-run elections. The popular vote measure had potential for a more structural democratic change with national implications. But even if Virginia had passed it, the immediate impact was unclear.
The change would only take effect if enough states join for the compact to represent a majority of the country’s electoral votes, or 270 of 538. Currently, 16 states have signed on with a total of 196 electoral votes, according to the group advocating for the proposal in state legislatures around the country.
That threshold would have to be reached by July in order for the change to take effect in time for this fall’s presidential election. The bill’s sponsor, Del. Mark Levine, D-Alexandria, acknowledged that probably won’t happen.
“But it certainly could happen by 2024,” Levine said.
As the bill made its way through the General Assembly, the discussion mirrored the national debate over the Electoral College, with some lawmakers calling it outdated and unnecessary and others saying it still serves a vital purpose.
Democrats argued the Electoral College is undemocratic because it allows outcomes like the one in 2016, when President Donald Trump was declared the winner despite losing the national popular vote to Hillary Clinton.
About 44 percent of Virginia voters supported Trump, Levine said, but all of Virginia’s electoral votes went to Clinton. Even if Virginia stays blue, he said, a popular vote system would mean those votes would at least be added to a meaningful national tally.
“It allows every Virginian’s vote to be counted,” Levine said.
Republicans said a popular-vote system would diminish Virginia’s role in the democratic process and allow candidates to focus their campaigns on only the biggest cities and states, leaving out the parts of the country that have fewer voters.
“Instead of Virginia’s votes counting, it would really be California’s votes counting,” said Del. Chris Head, R-Botetourt.
On the House floor, Del. Lee Ware, R-Powhatan, a former history and government teacher, urged his colleagues to stand with Alexander Hamilton, who wrote that the Electoral College would allow the country to get “the sense of the people.”
“It’s not sufficient to go to a few big, urban megalopolises and get the votes,” Ware said.
Levine also pitched the popular vote as a remedy for voter apathy for Republicans in overwhelmingly blue cities and Democrats in solidly red states. Where there’s little political competition, Levine said, many people have concluded their votes don’t matter.
“Here’s the sad thing,” Levine said. “They’re right.”
About the Author
Funny, the (D)’s weren’t concerned with the EC on November 6th, 2016 when they bragged about the “Blue Wall” of over 200 EC votes in CA, NY and IL.
The cries for abolishing the EC started on November 8th, 2016.
But that’s the (D)’s for you. Every election they lose it’s because the system is bad, not that they have bad ideas.
The old Democrat party is being subsumed into the Democratic Socialist party as we speak, which party already claims such former Democrat notables as its thralls or minions as New York US senator Charley “Chuck” Schumer (@Nancyspoodle) and New York governor and despot and tyrant and two-bit tin-pot dictator Young Andy Cuomo (@Hailcaesar), and they are very organized, one of the hallmarks of Marxist Socialist/Communists that people not associated with the cult-like movement tend to overlook at their jeopardy, and the Democratic Socialists want to get rid of the electoral college and the senate and make it direct democracy instead, which will be chaos akin to the French Revolution, where everyday, things change and nothing is ever constant, but subject to the winds of passion and emotion, to wit:
Economic democracy would be complemented in the political sphere by a new system that combined an overhauled form of representative democracy (our current system) with direct democracy, a system in which individuals participate directly in the making of political decisions that affect them.
In this system, the Senate (an extremely unrepresentative political body in which states with very small populations have the same level of representation as the most populous states) would be abolished, and a system of proportional representation would be established so that Congress actually reflects the political will of the electorate.
end quotes
How very well organized they are can be seen from the following, and they are the power behind the Bernie Sanders Revolution (70 percent of millennials favor socialism), to wit:
Building DSA and the Socialist Left
DSA’s role in building progressive social movements is essential to our work; regardless of what we gain as an organization from this work, it is an end in itself.
Additionally, through our coalition work and community organizing we learn invaluable organizing skills and discover countless ways to improve the work that we do.
However, in order to be effective in this work, as well as to build broader-based, independent socialist organizations that we hope will grow over time into a powerful political force, we need to dramatically increase the ranks of the socialist movement in the United States.
While DSA has expanded significantly since 2010, there is still tremendous room for growth, especially in the wake of Sanders’ Political Revolution, which exposed countless young people to the idea of democratic socialism for the first time.
In order to take advantage of this potential, DSA chapters will use a range of tactics to help expand our activist and membership base.
First, we will place a greater emphasis on our critique of capitalism and positive vision of democratic socialism in our coalition, public education and community organizing work.
We will also devote more resources to developing new leaders through individual mentoring, skills training and educational programming.
Finally, we will engage in regular and intensive assessments of our organizational progress, while always working to recruit as many new members from a diverse an array of backgrounds.
Success across this spectrum of struggles should lead to a period when we can talk seriously about the transition to democratic socialism through reforms that fundamentally undermine the power of the capitalist system (often referred to as “non-reformist reforms”), such as the nationalization of strategic industries (banking, auto, etc.) and the creation of worker-controlled investment funds (created by taxing corporate profits) that will buy out capitalist stakes in firms and set up worker-owned and -operated firms on a large scale.
While it may sound premature to begin discussing such long-term objectives before we have achieved our more modest (though ambitious) short-term goals, it is critical that we advance a clear vision of our short-, medium- and long-term objectives and a credible account of how we might move from each stage of struggle to the next (more details related to this question can be found in DSA’s strategy document).
If we are not clear about where we are heading, we risk both losing track of the importance of our socialist identity and making strategic errors for the sake of short-term tactical gains.
For the foreseeable future our primary focus will be on building a vibrant, independent democratic socialist movement and helping to cultivate progressive coalitions capable of wielding political power at all levels.
But we should never lose sight of the democratic socialist vision that serves as the guiding thread tying together the many struggles for freedom and equality in which we are constantly engaged, day in, day out.