Alert!! State Legislatures Are Setting Up Way to Avoid Electoral College Votes

[Donner Party]

This was in the ARk-Demo Gazette today... let your state reps know you are not for this piece of -----... be nice...and decent. This will ensure that a dictator will have no trouble
taking over the country!



Bill reallotting electoral votes clears House

A proposal for Arkansas to pledge its electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes nationwide passed Wednesday in the state House of Representatives after one opponent read from a civics textbook, one pledged his love for Arkansas and the outdoors, and one quoted his grandfatherin-law.
House Bill 1339 by Rep. Eddie Cooper, D-Melbourne, proceeds to the Senate after a 56-43-1 vote.
The bill would pledge the state’s six electoral votes to an interstate compact with other states if they pass similar legislation, awarding Arkansas’ electoral votes not to the candidate who won the state, but to the candidate who won the most votes nationwide.
Cooper started things off by saying he didn’t see any way to argue that the candidate who gets the most votes should win that office.
Plenty of his Republican colleagues didn’t see it that way.
Rep. Dan Greenberg, R-Little Rock, after extolling the virtues of Arkansas’ sparsely populated landscape, argued that entering into an agreement with other states to award electoral votes to the winner of the country’s popular vote would guarantee that presidential candidates would never visit the state.
“It’s an anti-Arkansas vote,” Greenberg said.
Ann Clemmer, a Republican from Benton and a political scientist at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, said it was “Civics 101” that Arkansas would be giving up some of its advantage by entering into the compact, which would take effect when states possessing 270 electoral votes have enacted the law.
So far, four states — Hawaii, Maryland, New Jersey and Illinois — with 50 electoral votes have approved similar legislation.
At times reading from a textbook, Clemmer said Arkansas, along with other rural states, has more power under the current system, in which each state’s electors cast their ballots in the Electoral College for the presidential candidate that won their state.
If Arkansas voted for a candidate who lost the popular vote nationwide, Clemmer said, the legislation would require the state, in effect, to tell voters: “We voted to ignore what you said.”
His grandfather-in-law and other “old-timers” often know what’s best similar to how the nation’s founders designed the Electoral College to withstand the test of time, said Rep. Davy Carter, R-Cabot.
Times have changed, said Rep. Monty Davenport, D-Yellville, a co-sponsor of the bill who led an unsuccessful effort in 2007 to pass similar legislation. The nation’s founders also excluded blacks and women from voting, Davenport said.
The Electoral College was established by the founding fathers as a compromise between election of the president by Congress and election by popular vote. The people of the United States vote for the electors who then vote for the president, according to the National Archives and Records Administration, which administers the Electoral College.
Mike Burris, a Democrat from Malvern, said the bill expressed a simple political principle: “one person, one vote.”
Cooper said he often talks to young people who have lost faith in politics because of the 2000 presidential election in which Democrat Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the election to Republican George W. Bush.
“They feel as though their vote doesn’t count,” Cooper said
He cited a December 2008 poll by National Popular Vote, which showed that 80 percent of Arkansans supported the legislation. National Popular Vote is a nonprofit organization attempting to get the states across the country to approve similar legislation.
After the vote, the state Republican Party released a statement from Chairman Doyle Webb expressing disappointment.
“It is inconceivable that our elected officials, those we trust to safeguard the integrity of our beloved Arkansas, would choose to give our voice to other, larger states like New York and California,” read Webb’s statement, urging Arkansans to urge their state senators to vote against HB1339.
But Cooper said if Arkansas passes the bill, it might gain respect from the national political parties if candidates realize that they can add Arkansas votes to their national tally without having to win the state.
“You might not have to pay for a yard sign to put in your yard,” he said.