Debra Bowen, California Secretary of State
January 22, 2014
Contact: Nicole Winger, (916) 653-6575
Presidential Elector Initiative Enters Circulation
Electoral Votes. Presidential and Vice-Presidential Candidates Initiative Statute.
SACRAMENTO – Secretary of State Debra Bowen today announced the proponent of a new initiative may begin collecting petition signatures for his measure.
The Attorney General prepares the legal title and summary that is required to appear on initiative petitions. When the official language is complete, the Attorney General forwards it to the proponent and to the Secretary of State, and the initiative may be circulated for signatures. The Secretary of State then provides calendar deadlines to the proponent and to county elections officials. The Attorney General’s official title and summary for the measure is as follows:
ELECTORAL VOTES. PRESIDENTIAL AND VICE-PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES. INITIATIVE STATUTE. Changes existing law which awards all of the State’s electoral votes to the presidential and vice-presidential winners of the popular vote within California, and instead divides and assigns electoral votes to the candidates according to their share of the popular vote. Requires each presidential elector to live in California. Requires Secretary of State to determine the percentage of the popular vote received by each candidate and certify to each candidate and political party the number of electoral votes won by each candidate. Summary of estimate by Legislative Analyst and Director of Finance of fiscal impact on state and local government: No direct fiscal effect on state or local governments. (13-0045.)
The Secretary of State’s tracking number for this measure is 1633 and the Attorney General’s tracking number is 13-0049.
The proponent for the measure, Hal Nickle, must collect signatures of 504,760 registered voters – the number equal to five percent of the total votes cast for governor in the 2010 gubernatorial election – in order to qualify it for the ballot. The proponent has 150 days to circulate petitions for the measure, meaning the signatures must be collected by June 20, 2014.
The proponent can be reached at makeourvotecount@gmail.com. No phone number was provided.
To sign up for regular ballot measure updates via email, RSS feed, or Twitter, go to www.sos.ca.gov/multimedia.
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Without a constitutional amendment, the office of presidential elector remains. A presidential elector is a person, and a person’s vote cannot be divided into fractions. Under this proposal, California would have to use a whole-number proportional approach.
Campaigning is rarely capable of shifting more than 8% of the vote during a typical presidential campaign. Only two or three electoral votes might be in play in California (with 55 electoral votes). Instead of winner-take-all, California would be a “winner-take-two” or a “winner-take-three” state.
There is a prohibitive political impediment associated with the adoption of the whole-number proportional approach on a piecemeal basis by individual states. Any state that enacts the proportional approach on its own would reduce its own influence. This was the most telling argument that caused Colorado voters to agree with Republican Governor Bill Owens and to reject, by a two-to-one margin, the ballot measure in November 2004 to award Colorado’s electoral votes using the whole-number proportional approach. This inherent defect cannot be remedied unless all 50 states and the District of Columbia were to simultaneously enact the proportional approach. This inherent defect cannot be remedied if, for example, 10, 20, 30, or even 40 states were to enact the whole-number proportional approach on a piecemeal basis. If as many as 48 or 49 states allocated their electoral votes proportionally, but just one or two large, closely divided battleground winner-take-all states did not, the state(s) continuing to use the winner-take-all system would immediately become the only state(s) that would matter in presidential politics. Thus, if states were to start adopting the proportional approach on a piecemeal basis, each additional state adopting the approach would increase the influence of the remaining winner-take-all states and thereby decrease the chance that the additional winner-take-all states would adopt the approach. A state-by-state process of adopting the proportional approach would bring itself to a halt.
A national popular vote is the way to make every person’s vote equal and matter to their candidate because it guarantees that the candidate who gets the most votes in all 50 states and DC becomes President.
“Awarding California’s electoral votes based on the outcome in each congressional district is unfair, harmful to democratic precepts and a blatant political power grab. Such ridiculous thinking should be abandoned.”
Editorial Board
Stockton Record
“A proposed change… in the way California’s votes are allocated in the presidential election might have a sheen of fairness, but it is nakedly partisan and profoundly subversive of our constitutional system.”
Editorial Board
Orange County Register
“California shouldn’t unilaterally switch methods of determining how it apportions electoral votes. Any change must be applied equally to all states. Otherwise, it’s naked politics masquerading as reform.”
Editorial Board
San Jose Mercury News
“The fight isn’t about Republicans vs. Democrats. It is about whether to twist the nation’s system of electing presidents to give one party an unfair advantage. No principled elected official, or voter, of either party should support that.”
Editorial Board
New York Times
Instead, The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC).
Every vote, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in presidential elections. No more distorting and divisive red and blue state maps pre-determining the outcome. There would no longer be a handful of ‘battleground’ states where voters and policies are more important than those of the voters in 80% of the states that now are just ‘spectators’ and ignored after the conventions.
California has enacted the National Popular Vote bill.
When the bill is enacted by states with a majority of the electoral votes– enough electoral votes to elect a President (270 of 538), all the electoral votes from the enacting states would be awarded to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC.
The presidential election system that we have today was not designed, anticipated, or favored by the Founders but, instead, is the product of decades of evolutionary change precipitated by the emergence of political parties and enactment by 48 states of winner-take-all laws, not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution.
The bill uses the power given to each state by the Founders in the Constitution to change how they award their electoral votes for President. States can, and frequently have, changed their method of awarding electoral votes over the years. Historically, virtually all of the major changes in the method of electing the President, including ending the requirement that only men who owned substantial property could vote and 48 current state-by-state winner-take-all laws, have come about by state legislative action.
In Gallup polls since 1944, only about 20% of the public has supported the current system of awarding all of a state’s electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each separate state (with about 70% opposed and about 10% undecided).
Support for a national popular vote is strong among Republicans, Democrats, and Independent voters, as well as every demographic group in virtually every state surveyed in recent polls in recent or past closely divided Battleground states: CO – 68%, FL – 78%, IA 75%, MI – 73%, MO – 70%, NH – 69%, NV – 72%, NM– 76%, NC – 74%, OH – 70%, PA – 78%, VA – 74%, and WI – 71%; in Small states (3 to 5 electoral votes): AK – 70%, DC – 76%, DE – 75%, ID – 77%, ME – 77%, MT – 72%, NE 74%, NH – 69%, NV – 72%, NM – 76%, OK – 81%, RI – 74%, SD – 71%, UT – 70%, VT – 75%, WV – 81%, and WY – 69%; in Southern and Border states: AR – 80%, KY- 80%, MS – 77%, MO – 70%, NC – 74%, OK – 81%, SC – 71%, TN – 83%, VA – 74%, and WV – 81%; and in other states polled: AZ – 67%, CA – 70%, CT – 74%, MA – 73%, MN – 75%, NY – 79%, OR – 76%, and WA – 77%.
Americans believe that the candidate who receives the most votes should win.
The bill has passed 32 state legislative chambers in 21 rural, small, medium, and large states with 243 electoral votes. The bill has been enacted by 10 jurisdictions, including California, with 136 electoral votes – 50.4% of the 270 necessary to go into effect.
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