NEWS

New bill seeks to align Michgan’s electoral vote with popular vote

While many areas around campus feature flower beds that are pollinator-friendly, the new garden specifically has plants that will be food sources throughout the year. These include hibiscus, butterfly bushes, reed grass, and coneflowers. A tree was also planted as part of WCC’s tree campus work.
Another focus of Bee Campus USA is limiting the amount of pesticides used on campus. WCC follows an integrated pest management (IPM) plan, which states the order of pest control measures to be used. The use of chemicals should always be a last resort, according to the IPM plan.

By Jacob Kuiper
Staff Writer

The American way of electing a national leader is one global peculiarity. Instead of simply voting as a nation for our next president, a middleman is set in place in the form of the Electoral College.The Electoral College is what actually decides who the next president will be, and sometimes it disagrees with a majority of Americans.

A local lawmaker is among those who want to change that.

State Rep. Carrie Rheingans, an Ann Arbor Democrat, seeks to have Michigan join a group of states that agree to award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. She’s the lead sponsor of a bill in the House to have the state join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

The presidency is the only elected office in our entire country where the second-place vote getter can actually win,” says Rheingans. The change would bring the presidency in line with all other elected offices in the country where a candidate must gain at least a plurality to win.

How we got here

When the Founding Fathers were seeking to ratify the Constitution, the issue of representation became an issue: Small states feared they would suffer under the political power of more populated states. As a compromise, they created a system where the president would be elected based not on the popular vote, but on the “electoral vote.”

A state’s popular vote would be converted into a number of electoral votes equal to that state’s number of congressional representatives plus its number of senators. (Michigan, for instance, has two senators and 13 representatives so it has 15 electoral votes.)

The Electoral College effectively gives extra power to smaller states. In theory, this institution protects smaller states from the “tyranny of the majority;” forcing candidates to win not just a large number of raw votes, but also win a large number of individual states.

This, however, is not what always happens in practice.

Candidates who appeal to a large number of individual states can sometimes circumvent a popular vote deficit because of the extra electoral votes they are awarded. In recent times, two of our last four presidents have been elected without actually winning a majority of votes.

What’s next

While seemingly not a fan of the Electoral College, Rheingans stresses that she has no intention of fighting against or abolishing the institution: she just wants to change how it awards its votes.

“I want the electoral college to be aligned with the will of the people,” she says. “The will of the people and the popular vote should be what determines who represents all of us.”

However, even if this bill were to pass it would not change Michigan’s voting laws immediately. That’s because the compact is not legally enforceable until the combined number of state electoral votes reaches a majority, that is 270.

Currently 15 states plus the District of Columbia are a part of the compact, totalling 195 votes. If Michigan were to join, its 15 electoral votes would bring that number to 210, still short of a majority. Still, advocates say that this is an important next step to the compact’s eventual

Rheingans hopes to move the bill forward with a full committee vote in May.