Colorado’s celebrated shift from red-state stronghold into a competitive purple battleground offers a major benefit — even to those who regret the change.
Presidential candidates come here, compete for our votes, and address regional concerns. But a bill rolling though the legislature would throw away our growing significance and push us back toward political irrelevance.
The proposal, House Bill 1299, mangles the successful constitutional framework for electing presidents that has served our nation for 200-plus years, with an untested scheme designed to avoid the serious public consideration required to amend the Constitution.
HB 1299 surrenders Colorado voters’ right to choose the winner of the state’s electoral votes for president. Instead, HB 1299 awards Colorado’s nine presidential votes (based on Colorado’s nine total seats in the U.S. House and Senate) to the winner of the nationwide popular vote, even if Colorado voters favor a different candidate.
With similar measures introduced in other states, HB 1299 aims to form a band of states controlling a majority of electoral votes that agree to cast those votes — not for the candidate chosen by state voters — but to the winner of the national popular vote. Tossing the Electoral College for a national popular vote is a bad idea for lots of reasons. The approach of HB 1299 is especially objectionable.
Destroying the Electoral College pushes presidential campaigns to focus on populous states like California and New York while dismissing smaller states like Colorado and most points between the coasts. Why should candidates waste time and money campaigning here if they can win our electoral votes without working here?
This concern is more than regional boosterism. It promotes practical national governance. The president is not the mayor of the great, undifferentiated American metropolis. He’s the presiding executive of a nation of diverse states. Assembling winning coalitions of state votes compels candidates to broaden their platform and balance regional interests.
Removing that incentive invites campaigns to grasp for 51 percent of the overall vote by concentrating their campaigns in the biggest urban population pockets. Appealing to New York, Chicago and Philadelphia in order win the electoral votes of states like Colorado is not a recipe for balanced governing.
A national popular tally will generate more uncertainty and bitter fights over unresolved elections. The current system of state-by-state tallies insulates results in most states; only states with razor margins prompt fights over counting a few votes more or less. Disputes focus on individual states. But exalting the national total, rather than combined state tallies, encourages fights over votes in every precinct in the country. The nasty Florida fight of 2000 was a popgun compared to the nuclear explosion that would result if a close election could be swung by counting — or blocking or manufacturing — a few more votes anywhere in any precinct in the nation.
It’s difficult to imagine a more enticing invitation to unscrupulous supporters, no matter how honorable each campaign is.
HB 1299’s constitutionality is dubious. The Constitution’s authorization for legislatures to choose how to allocate electoral votes surely assumes a mechanism based on their actual states’ votes. Otherwise, there would be no bar to legislatures awarding state votes by a poll of experts, or even by fanciful triggers such as whether the National League or the American League wins baseball’s World Series, or whether Punxsutawney Phil sees his shadow.
America’s framers produced a revolutionary structure. It included separation of powers and creative federalism blending national authority with state authority; and blending pure numerical representation with an element of state equality. The result is the most successful and enduring political system in history, producing more liberty and practical political resilience than anything else in human experience.
A few academics and politicians want to scrap that system for no compelling reason. And they want to change the time-tested constitutional system by a contrived state scheme that avoids the heavy lifting of amending the Constitution. Colorado voters in 2004 rejected a move toward the popular vote for presidential elections. We should stick with that wisdom.
Shawn Mitchell, a Republican from Broomfield, represents District 23 in the Colorado Senate.
