The Deyoe Dispatch

By State Representative Dave Deyoe

Strange End to the Week

Last week, I wrote about the upcoming vote on the prevailing wage bill. As I write this column Sunday night, it is still technically Thursday in the Iowa House of Representatives, because we never adjourned. In an unprecedented move, Speaker of the House Patrick Murphy chose to leave the voting machine open all weekend when the vote on the bill fell one vote short of passage. This has created a somewhat bizarre scene in which the Speaker or a surrogate  has to remain in the Speaker’s chair around the clock all weekend in the hope that someone will change their vote on Monday. Of course this also means both parties need a couple representatives on hand and a state trooper or two, at all times, to make sure no one messes with the machine.  

All reports I have heard indicate they still won’t have the votes on Monday. We will need to close the machine and adjourn, so that we can gavel in for Monday’s session.

Maybe someday we will get around to doing something that will actually create jobs or help Iowa’s economy.

National Popular Vote Bill

HSB 98 has been introduced in the Iowa Senate and would change the way that the President is elected by requiring Iowa to cast their electoral votes via the national popular vote instead of the statewide popular vote. I have already received a large number of e-mails strongly opposing this bill.

Under the bill, Iowa would join a national compact that would all agree to do this.  The agreement does not go into place until there are enough members of the compact to possess a majority of the electoral votes.  Iowa could withdraw from the compact as long as it is at least 6 months before the presidential election.

This effort started after the 2000 Bush/Gore election when Bush won the Electoral College vote, but lost the popular vote. Democrats eager to get rid of the Electoral College would do well to remember that Kerry almost pulled off the opposite feat four years later. A shift of 60,000 votes would have elected Kerry in 2004, even though President Bush was ahead by 3,500,000 votes nationwide.

One of the drawbacks to our current system is that candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, or pay attention to the concerns of states where they are safely ahead or hopelessly behind. Instead, candidates concentrate their attention on a small handful of closely divided "battleground" states. This means that voters in two thirds of the states are ignored in presidential elections. In 2004, candidates concentrated over two-thirds of their money and campaign visits in just five states; over 80% in nine states; and over 99% of their money in just 16 states. Of course Iowa has enjoyed more than our share of attention in recent years because we have been one of those battleground states.

The U.S. Constitution gives the states exclusive and plenary control over the manner of awarding of their electoral votes. The winner-take-all rule is not in the Constitution. It was not the founder's choice (having been used by only three states in the nation's first presidential election). Maine and Nebraska currently award electoral votes by district—a reminder that a federal constitutional amendment is not required to change the way the President is elected.

Here are some of the reasons many oppose this bill:

• Sidestepping the electoral college undermines the political role of the states
• This is not an ‘interstate compact’ because it imposes its will on states not a party to the compact
• A small number of states (enough to cast 270 electoral votes) can dictate an outcome on the remaining states (11 vs. 39 at the extreme). Theoretically a candidate could lose badly in Iowa, but all our electoral votes would go to that candidate anyway if  they won enough big states.
• The compact is subject to political manipulation because the states in the compact can keep it if it imposes an outcome they support, and dissolve it if it produces an outcome they oppose.
• The proposal leads candidates to attend to states/regions with demographic characteristics that enable candidates to efficiently appeal for votes (large cities with lots of people in one TV market), while the current system leads candidates to attend to states that are ‘competitive’.
  This has two negative effects.
  • Demographic characteristics change more slowly than political characteristics, so the proposal creates a more permanent set of unattended-to states and  regions.
  • Demographic characteristics are less susceptible to change by political parties and activists, so the proposal removes a powerful incentive for political involvement
• The proposal would worsen, not improve the likely outcomes of close elections like the 2000 presidential election.  This is because the proposal increases the incentive to require the counting of every vote, and to challenge every questionable vote.  While in principle attractive, in reality it courts disaster because:
  Over 6 million votes went uncounted or miscounted nationwide in 2000. Under the current system, only those in Florida were problematic.  Under the proposal, they would all be problematic.  This would increase the prospects for conflict, accusations of corruption and cheating, and greatly undermine the legitimacy of whoever was declared the winner in the eyes of the losers.  In reality, 2000 was nearly a tie, no system would have improved the outcome, and this proposal would have made it worse.

This bill has not yet cleared the full committee.