Democracy, it’s been said, can be two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner. Unfortunately, a desire for this kind of democracy seems to motivate supporters of NPV like George Soros’s Demos Foundation.

Mel Gibson in The Patriot summed up a real concern of many Americans during our Revolution: why exchange one tyrant 3,000 miles away for 3,000 tyrants one mile away? That is, democracy can be just as destructive of minority rights as a king.

That’s why the Constitution of the United States and every state constitution is chock full of anti-democratic provisions. Think about it: every structure and process is a potential check against the desires of a majority. Representation itself exists to create responsible government, which means more than simply responsiveness to public moods.

The Bill of Rights is a series of anti-democratic restrictions. Constitutional protections exist to restrain majorities from using government to abuse minorities. Of course, the Constitution can be amended, but only by a supermajority—another check against the power of 50% plus 1 to do whatever they please.

On their ideas action blog, Demos lawyer Allegra Chapman asks, “what if the executive sworn into office doesn’t represent the popular vote?”

First, elected officials don’t represent votes. They represent people. And their job is to represent all the people, whether they voted for them, against them, or not at all.

Second, what Allegra seems to be struggling to say is “what if the candidate with the most votes doesn’t win?” She goes on to complain that the Electoral College makes this possible and she claims that it’s happened four times in American history (we know it has happened twice, in 2000 and 1888 , but 1876 and 1824 are dubious examples). Of course, we can’t answer Allegra’s question without knowing why the Electoral College allows that to happen and whether it’s a better system than using the raw national vote total.

Unfortunately, Allegra plunges on, advocating NPV as a “remedy” without ever explaining her bias for raw democracy or why she believes it’s better than the geographical balance and political stability provided by the Electoral College system.

She reproduces two standard NPV arguments: NPV will establish perfect voter equality by making the nation a single electoral jurisdiction (newsflash: even candidates in single-member districts slice and dice the electorate according to every demographic data point available, making all kinds of distinctions among voters and geographic regions) and NPV-sponsored opinion polls support—surprise—NPV. Once again, simply because a majority says something doesn’t tell us whether it’s the right answer–especially if we want to protect minority rights.

It is several months old, but a recent paper by Bradley A. Smith, former Chairman of the Federal Election Commission, is well worth reading: Vanity of Vanities: National Popular Vote and the Electoral College.

Smith reviews “Every Vote Equal: A State-Based Plan for Electing the President by National Popular Vote,” the 600-page treatise supporting the NPV/Koza Scheme. He makes several interesting observations. A few are worth highlighting here:

• The founders of NPV assume that the Electoral College is a bad device. They spend little time actually arguing the point or defending their position. The 600-page treatise devotes 350+ pages to explaining NPV. The appendices and source documents take another 200+ pages. Barely a dozen pages address WHY the Electoral College should be (essentially) abolished or why such a change would be an improvement.
• NPV often argues that the Electoral College encourages presidential candidates to “pander” to voters in battleground states, at the expense of voters in safe states. But Smith notes that these “battleground” states are a diverse group, representing east and west, urban and rural, minorities and non-minorities. He concludes, “Thus, even on a shrunken battleground, it is likely that pandering too strongly to parochial concerns will be checked by the need to compete in another ‘battleground’ state elsewhere.” And, he adds, NPV has not made a case that their plan will prevent harmful pandering to voters.
• Smith discusses the many problems that could arise during a national recount under NPV. The plan does not contain a recount provision, leaving those logistics up to individual states. But state statutes governing recounts differ greatly. There would not be a single national standard governing a recount. In the end, each vote would not be weighted equally.
• Smith notes that NPV does not debate or discuss the impact of its plan on voter turnout and campaign strategies. Campaigns by nature have a finite number of resources and dollars. They have to make decisions about how to use those resources. Those decisions will change as the rules of the game change. As Smith observes, “George Bush might have devoted much more time to assuring a large turnout of Republican faithful in rural Texas. Whether this would be superior to Bush campaigning for the votes of undecided voters in battleground states—for example, the suburbs of Minneapolis, or Franklin County, Ohio, is debatable, but Every Vote Equal again eschews any debate—it merely asserts.”

Smith concludes, “One reads Every Vote Equal with a sense that one is listening in on a group of people who haven’t thought much about what they are doing, and don’t want to be bothered. Thus, Representative Tom Campbell casually and inappropriately uses “voters” and “residents” interchangeably; Senator Birch Bayh casually, incorrectly, and given the subject matter, tellingly mistakes “plurality” with “majority.” Nowhere in Every Vote Equal is there a sense that the authors have thought hard about the effect of a national election on state political parties or the system of state presidential primaries . . . . Mr. Koza and the other contributors to Every Vote Equal seem to have thought of many things, from what to do in the ridiculously slim possibility that the national popular vote should end in an exact tie, to circumventing the difficult procedures for amending the Constitution. Less attention seems to have been given to what will happen after we adopt National Popular Vote.”