Michigan Democrats approve National Popular Vote scheme

‘National Popular Vote’ scheme would make Michigan electorally irrelevant

Michigan voters have long played a pivotal role in presidential elections, until now.

The House Elections Committee in Lansing recently approved House Bill 156, legislation which would enroll Michigan in the so-called “National Popular Vote Interstate Compact,” which could soon be taken up on the House Floor.

It may sound innocent, but National Popular Vote is a left-wing scheme to take over states’ elections and fundamentally transform our constitutional system for electing presidents. If implemented, it would surrender Michigan’s considerable influence in this process to large population centers of the East and West coasts of the country.

In other words, Michiganders would be relegated from decisive swing state voters to mere bystanders in presidential elections.

No longer would Michigan’s fifteen electoral votes go to the presidential candidate who wins support from a majority of the state’s voters. Rather, they would be assigned to whichever candidate gets the most total votes across all the nation’s various state election systems.

So the loser of presidential elections in Michigan would often receive all of Michigan’s electoral votes, with the outcome decided instead by the voters in California, New York, Florida, Texas, and Illinois.

New York has 19 million residents, California 39 million, Texas 32 million, Florida 22 million. Michigan has a population of only about 10 million — not much more than metropolitan Chicago, which one can travel through by car in less than an hour.

This doesn’t just dilute the vote of Michiganders — it obliterates it. The Founding Fathers were careful to devise a system where smaller states and less urban populations had a fair say in electing the president.