In an attempt to sabotage the national popular vote compact, a growing agreement between states to allocate presidential electors on the basis of a national popular vote, the North Dakota Senate has passed a bill making it illegal for the vote totals to be released before the actual electoral college vote.
The theory here is that if North Dakota does not report the vote, there is no popular vote count, and hence, no basis for the national popular vote compact to execute.
My suggestion for the states that have already entered into the vote compact, about 190 EVs so far, is to change the vote compact to reflect the total REPORTED vote.
This means that the state of North Dakota loses representation, but f%$# them with Cheney’s dick:
The North Dakota Senate this week passed a bill which aims to forbid election officials from disclosing how many actual votes are cast for each candidate in upcoming presidential elections. The total tallies would only be disclosed after future Electoral Colleges convene to select an official victor.
The measure, Senate Bill 2271, was introduced by Sen. Robert Erbele, a Republican from Lehr, N.D., who represents a district situated southeast of Bismarck. It would withhold the state’s vote count from the public and allow officials to only reveal the percentage of the total vote each candidate receives.
“[A] public officer, employee, or contractor of this state or of a political subdivision of this state may not release to the public the number of votes cast in the general election for the office of the president of the United States until after the times set by law for the meetings and votes of the presidential electors in all states,” the bill states. “After the votes for presidential electors are canvassed, the secretary of state may release the percentage of statewide votes cast for each set of presidential electors to the nearest hundredth of a percentage point, a list of presidential candidates in order of increasing or decreasing percentage of the vote received by presidential electors selected by the candidates, and the presidential candidate whose electors received the highest percentage of votes.”
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The bill is designed to prevent implementation of the national popular vote compact – a multi-state agreement aimed at circumventing the Electoral College.
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The national popular vote compact is a nascent agreement amongst a coalition of states which have enacted statutes dictating that their presidential electors only cast votes for the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The compact—which would effectively neuter the Electoral College—takes effect once the coalition of states involved possess 270 or more electoral votes. According to nationalpopularvote.com, the agreement has been passed into law in 16 states possessing a total 196 Electoral College votes, including New York, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.
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Appearing on the political podcast Plain Talk, the former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, Saul Anuzis, said the measure was “almost a politburo situation from Soviet Russia,” referring to the political policymaking committee in the former Soviet Union.
The comments of former chairman of the Michigan GOP lickening this action to the Soviet Politburo is completely unfair though, to the Soviet Politburo.
They were way more respectful of the will of the people than the North Dakota Republican Party.
Honestly, I think that it is time to right a historic wrong, and merge North and South Dakota, who were only created as separate states to create partisan advantage.
You are not entirely right about the N/S Dakota split.
Yes there was an attempt for electoral advantage, which backfired spectacularly, but also there was an informal policy about state size W of the Mississippi — they should be roughly the same — so that the Senate would not get too out of wack.
In fact this geographic policy preceded the W states, if you look at some of the sizes of the later E states.