Colorado moves to thwart the Electoral College

Somebody is still a little peeved about losing the 2016 presidential election, or so it seems. The “somebody” in question would be the Democrats in Colorado’s state government. They introduced a bill which has already passed the state Senate and it’s intended to assign all of Colorado’s electoral college votes to the presidential candidate who wins the national popular vote. I wonder who they think that might benefit more? (CBS Denver)

Colorado could help change the way the nation elects presidents. Democratic lawmakers have introduced a bill that would support the winner of a national popular vote.

It has already passed the State Senate.

The debate over whether to get rid of the Electoral College heated up after the 2016 election, when Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote, but President Donald Trump won the electoral vote.

The attempts to justify this sort of end-around run at the Constitution would be hilarious if the subject weren’t so serious. One of the bill’s sponsors, Democratic Representative Emily Sirota, attempted to explain it this way. “It’s to make every vote count equally no matter where you live in the country, and we should elect the President as a nation, as a whole.”

That seems to be a popular line among supporters of such measures around the country, but it’s also blatantly untrue. How are you ensuring “every vote counts equally” if the votes cast by people who supported the loser of the national popular vote are simply erased? And in case Ms. Sirota hasn’t had time to read the Constitution yet, the founders went to great pains to craft a system where we specifically don’t elect presidents as a nation. In fact, a large amount of the effort expended in drafting the Constitution went to ensuring that each individual state had a say in the matter.

Thankfully, as with most of the rest of the states (plus the District of Columbia) that have enacted similar legislation, this law wouldn’t go into effect unless all of those states mustered a combined 270 electoral votes. And even if they manage to reach that unlikely target, court challenges based on such a plan being unconstitutional would likely either sink the effort or tie it up in the courts for a very long time.

The bottom line is that if you don’t like the Constitution, either work with like-minded citizens to try to change it or move to a country with a constitution more to your liking.