National Popular Vote LTE - 2019

The CNN Insider Cary Poarch which worked with Project Veritas said, “I just want us to have a free and fair election.” Which is why he wanted to expose what he saw as bias, but there is a movement to make a National Popular Vote Compact which is also quite dangerous to the future of the country. The reason why New Hampshire has so many candidates come to the state is because NH is a swing state and because our first in the nation primary. We have set ourselves up to be influential in spite of our smaller population than a lot of other states. The National Popular Vote Compact tries to do a run around Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution by having states agree to commit their Electoral College votes to the result of the national popular vote instead of trying to amend the Constitution to get rid of the Electoral College. There is an effort to do it this way because a constitutional amendment for that would not pass. HB541 is a bill to join the compact and will change NH from a battleground state into insignificance. The compact goes into effect when they get enough electoral votes to win. States with 196 electoral votes have already signed on so they just need states with 74 electoral votes to agree and then the United States electoral landscape would change forever.

National Popular Vote would change campaigns by moving campaign money and stops to where they could get the most people seeing the ads and attending the campaign stops. Money and time would go to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Washington, Miami, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Boston. The politicians would be focusing on issues in cities while rural America would be left out which could create a rift and could lead to large parts of the country being disaffected. The worst case would be leading to a civil war or breakup of the US into multiple countries.

The Electoral College requires that a range of states with different characteristics are battlegrounds for votes, while popular vote just leads to dense population centers dictating the policy for rural America. It is quite possible that before the 2024 election the National Popular Vote Compact will go into effect and strip rural America and New Hampshire specifically from being influential in Presidential elections which is why I think a vote for HB541 is a vote against New Hampshire’s interests and may hasten the end of this great union.