Maine a Step Closer to Tying Electoral Votes to National Popular Vote

Maine’s legislature has approved a bill that would award its four electoral college votes for U.S. president to whoever wins the majority of the national votes.

The Democrat-backed bill was narrowly pushed through the Maine House on Tuesday by a 73–72 margin over the fierce resistance from Republicans. The state Senate followed suit the day after, approving the bill by a largely party-line 18–12 vote, with Republican state Sen. Matt Pouliot voting in favor while several Democrats opposed it.

It now awaits the approval of Gov. Janet Mills, who has 10 days to either sign, veto, or allow the bill to become law without her signature.

The Democrat governor has yet to say whether she will sign the bill into law. If she chose not to veto it, Maine would join 15 states and the District of Columbia to adopt the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact—a pledge that their electoral votes go to the presidential candidate with the most overall votes across the nation.

Those states are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. As of now, the pact’s members collectively control 205 electoral votes, 65 votes short of what is needed to send the winner of the national popular vote straight to the White House.

“In 2000, we elected a president who did not get the most votes and then again in 2016, we elected a president who did not get the most votes,” Maine state Rep. Arthur Bell, the leading sponsor of the bill, said in January. “It’s kind of awkward and it doesn’t feel right.”

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Mr. Bell was referring to former Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump. The former in 2004 won both the popular and electoral votes, and remains the most recent Republican president to have done so. Democrats, meanwhile, have won the popular vote in each election since President Bush’s 2004 reelection victory.

“It’ll give everyone the same level of vote,” Mr. Bell said, speaking of his proposal. “Your vote is going to count the same as mine and the same as somebody in California or Texas or anywhere else.”

Republicans disagreed. Tying Maine’s electoral votes to how popular a candidate is at a national level, they argued, would make Maine voters’ voices matter less—especially for those in the conservative, rural part of the state.

Condemning the bill as a “shortcut” that “cheat[s] the system,” Ms. Libby added that if Democrats want to change the way Americans elect their presidents, they should push for a constitutional amendment rather than pursuing the interstate compact strategy.

It requires a two-thirds majority in the U.S. Congress to pass a constitutional amendment, in addition to ratification by three-quarters of the states—a considerably higher threshold compared to simply passing a bill in the state Legislature.

“It is a blatant run around the Constitution,” she said. “It shows such a lack of respect for Maine’s people, for the Constitution, and for the founding principles of our country.”

Also among the measure’s critics is Matthew Gagnon, the chief executive of non-partisan think tank Maine Policy Institute. Democrats, he said, should be careful what they wish for, as their previous efforts to enact sweeping institutional changes for short-term gains have resulted in unintended consequences.

“Remember when Democrats changed the filibuster rules in the Senate in order to ram through Obama-era judicial appointees? Well, that precedent is why the Supreme Court now has a 6-to-3 conservative majority on it, as Republicans took full advantage,” Mr. Gagnon wrote in an op-ed on Wednesday.

Calling on the governor to veto the bill, Mr. Gagnon noted that just because Republicans appear to be on a “losing streak” in terms of winning national popular votes, doesn’t mean this trend will continue indefinitely in future elections.

“Be careful of believing that either party is winning more popular votes in any era simply because they are more popular,” he wrote. “If the election was a simple popularity contest, they would’ve run entirely different campaigns, and we will never know how successful those campaigns would’ve been.”

“If we are truly to make this change, it needs to be done via a constitutional amendment. Mills must veto this legislation.”