Maine’s National Popular Vote bill (LD 56) was brought to the House floor and solidly defeated on Tuesday, February 2, 2010. The vote was 95 against and only 50 for the bill. The floor action came just two weeks after the Save Our States visit to Augusta.

Rep. Herb Adams

Much of the credit for this victory goes to Rep. Herb Adams of Portland. An instructor in government and civics at the University of Southern Maine, Rep. Adams bucked his Democratic Party leadership but brought nearly half his caucus with him after two and a half hours of floor debate. No Republicans voted for the NPV bill.

The measure has been introduced at least once in the last five years in all fifty states, but has been enacted in only five. Efforts to repeal the measure are underway in at least two of those states.

Preliminary reports indicated that NPV hired at least three lobbyists in Augusta and may have spent as much as $45,000 lobbying Maine legislators. (almost $1,000 per vote).

Save Our States visited Maine for one day, educating legislators, reporters, and citizen activists about the importance of preserving federalism and the risks inherent in NPV. With the great help of the Maine Heritage Policy Center, Senator Carol Weston, and Eagle Forum’s Wendy Pelletier, Save Our States was able to put the right information into the right hands in Augusta.

Up against a team of NPV hired guns, good arguments won the day.

It was my pleasure to spend my morning in Augusta at Maine’s State Capitol complex. I not only met a great bi-partisan group of state legislators, but also bumped into NPV’s own Chris Pearson.

A member of National Popular Vote‘s board of directors, Pearson is a former one-term Vermont state representative. A Progressive Party member, Pearson was beaten by a Democrat and went on to direct Vermont’s Progressive Party before going to work for John Koza and NPV. According to my legislative contacts, Pearson has worked the issue hard in Augusta but is neither personally compelling nor willing to answer simple questions about how NPV would work.

The latter is expected: some of the most basic questions about how a presidential election would work under NPV have no answers. That’s because NPV, as an end-run around the constitutional amendment process, is extremely limited in what it can actually do. Some of it’s more honest proponents agree that NPV is bad public policy, but support it as a way to “shake things up” or “force the issue” of an amendment.

A few questions NPV can’t answer:

• How would NPV deal with the need (or demand) for a national recount?
• If NPV is really a “national” process, how can it have no national standards for ballot access or voter qualifications?
• What happens if states disagree about who legitimately won the “national” vote?
• How would the different incentives created by changing the election process change American politics and the unity and stability of our country?

On top of these unanswered questions, NPV has an even higher hurdle in Maine. Maine and Nebraska are the two states that award electoral votes by congressional district (with the remaining two votes going to the statewide winner). For those who like this “congressional district allocation” system, NPV would take Maine backwards by forcing the state to grant all its electoral votes to a single candidate.

The Maine bill is LD 56 and is sponsored by Rep. John Martin. Tonight I’m in Hoosket, tomorrow: Montpelier.

Even my short stay in the Newark Airport was a reminder how different parts of America can be … well, different. New Jersey is distinct from Washington State and Massachusetts, the states on either end of my flights this morning.

Think about just how vast and diverse is our nation, our United States.

Smaller and more uniform nations have suffered the indignity of fracture and failure. Why does America work?

It’s easy to wonder if John Koza, the computer scientist who invented the scratch-off lottery ticket followed by the National Popular Vote proposal, has ever paused to consider that question. And who can blame Koza and his followers–it’s easy to take the things we’re used to, even our country, for granted.

National Popular Vote would tinker with the incentive structure of our national politics for the sake of something like procedural aesthetics: how the presidential election process looks or makes people feel. In a quest for a mathematically perfected system, it would sacrifice a politically sound system, with nary a thought to the consequences.

Not if Save Our States can help it. I spent the evening talking by phone and in person with key political leaders in Maine, with plenty more to do here tomorrow before heading for our next stop: Montpelier, Vermont.

The balance of power between state and national governments was one of the most contentious issues for the American Founders.

The states were important historically, but also as a way to keep government close to the people and to divide government power into as many hands as practical in order to preserve liberty.

At the Constitutional Convention small states wanted every state to have an equal voice in the national government. Large states desired just the opposite—representation based on population would give them more power.

It was a compromise that created the U.S. Congress, where states are represented equally in the Senate but according to population in the House. That compromise not only broke the deadlock that threatened to derail the Constitution—it became the foundation for the unique American system of Federalism.

The national government was set up to provide national defense, manage foreign trade, and referee disputes between the states—in short, to provide the states with safety and commerce similar to the way the British Empire did for the 13 original colonies. The states were left to manage their internal affairs and to compete with one another; thus the states are sometimes referred to as our “fifty laboratories of democracy.”

Federalism fosters diversity by allowing groups of people in different states to manage their affairs differently, to innovate or remain the same, to address local needs. And by keeping government local, dividing it up, and making it compete, Federalism protects freedom.

The American system of states is not just unique—it has been uniquely successful. Federalism is an American invention worth preserving.