“Hosting this seminar on the most important issue [the National Popular Vote proposal] in America nobody’s talking about. Everybody’s following the debt crisis in Europe, the presidential election in America, unemployment statistics, but nobody is paying much attention to the genuine threat to our country. That’s what I want to address this morning.”
- During a speech at the Heritage Foundation [a Koch brothers think tank] on Wednesday, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) called the idea of using the popular vote to determine the outcome of presidential elections a “genuine threat to our country”.
Watch the video:
McConnell and six Republican secretaries of state discussed the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPV), a proposed plan for using a popular vote in presidential elections. The NPV would guarantee whichever candidate wins the popular vote would also win the electoral college – preventing a repeat of the 2000 election when Al Gore won the most votes but still lost the presidency. It would do so by getting states to agree to collectively award their electoral votes to the popular vote winner, but the compact would only kick in once states with a majority of the electoral college sign on. Currently, eight states and the District of Columbia have joined the NPV, comprising 132 of the needed 270 electoral votes for the compact to take effect.
Rather than embracing the NPV as a way to solidify the Constitution’s guarantee of “one man, one vote,” McConnell lambasted the plan....
