I was initially confused when I saw what’s going on in North Dakota.
The North Dakota Senate this week passed a bill which aims to forbid election officials from disclosing how many actual votes are cast for each candidate in upcoming presidential elections. The total tallies would only be disclosed after future Electoral Colleges convene to select an official victor.
The Republicans have a 40-7 majority in the North Dakota Senate and this bill passed easily in a bipartisan 43-3 vote. I thought perhaps it won Democratic support because the object of the legislation was to prevent future efforts at election tampering like we saw in Georgia, where President Trump asked Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” precisely 11,780 votes.
The legislation would allow the state’s election officials to disclose the percentage won by each candidate, but not the total number of votes or the vote totals. Without that information, Trump wouldn’t have known how many votes he needed to win Georgia.
But I was being too optimistic. There is no good government motive beyond this legislation. Its aim is to thwart any effort to circumvent the Electoral College and elect the winner of the popular vote.
The bill is designed to prevent implementation of the national popular vote compact – a multi-state agreement aimed at circumventing the Electoral College…
…The national popular vote compact is a nascent agreement amongst a coalition of states which have enacted statutes dictating that their presidential electors only cast votes for the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The compact—which would effectively neuter the Electoral College—takes effect once the coalition of states involved possess 270 or more electoral votes. According to nationalpopularvote.com, the agreement has been passed into law in 16 states possessing a total 196 Electoral College votes, including New York, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.
The North Dakota law would prevent the state’s votes from being included in any effort to tally the popular vote until after the Electoral College meets, which would make it difficult if not impossible to use the popular vote compact.
I have to give the Republicans credit for creative thinking, but keeping the presidential election totals a state secret is a really extreme measure. Former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, Saul Anuzis, agrees, calling the measure “almost a Politburo situation from Soviet Russia.” Yet, three Democrats voted for it.
It’s pretty stupid though. The states passing the compact can add a clause to easily address this to say that they’d consider the votes of all states that have released them.
With a total population of less than 1 million, I don’t think it would prevent the Compact from awarding its EC votes to the popular vote winner unless the popular vote margin of victory is less than 1 million and/or the number of total registered voters in North Dakota.
Of course, the Compact still has a long way to go, so it’s North Dakota’s way of spitting on democracy, so I guess the Republicans there were “victorious” after all.
This doesn’t seem like a local ND concern. This probably came out of ALEC or something like it. If they get away with it they’ll probably go for more states.