The Founding Fathers firmly rejected a purely popular vote to elect the president because they wanted to balance the power of the larger states against the smaller. The Electoral College was fashioned as a compromise between an election of the president by direct popular vote and election by Congress.
Now the NPV effort could change the way Americans vote without amending the U.S. Constitution. The plan simply requires that enough states sign up to its efforts.
It normally takes three-quarters of the states’ legislatures to pass a constitutional amendment. NPV is trying to bypass this process by minimizing the number of states that would need to agree.
With the addition of Rhode Island to the NPV effort, the pact now has nine states plus the District of Columbia for a total of 136 of the 270 electoral votes needed to render the Electoral College irrelevant. The other states signed up are Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Washington, Vermont and California.
NPV is openly partnered with FairVote, a project of the Soros-funded Center for Voting and Democracy.
FairVote’s executive director Rob Richie co-authored Every Vote Equal: A State-Based Plan for Electing the President by National Popular Vote, a book explaining how the National Popular Vote plan would work. The book’s other author is John R. Koza, NPV’s founder.
Richie also a member of the civil society committee of the Soros-led Bretton Woods Committee, which openly seeks to remake the world economy.
In a December 15, 2008 Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Jonathan Soros, son of George Soros, wrote that it was time to junk the Electoral College.
Soros’s Open Society Institute funds the Center for Voting and Democracy, where FairVote is based.
The center’s website notes the group was kick-started in 1997 with two grants – one from the Open Society and another from the Joyce Foundation.
With Obama on its board, the Joyce Foundation also funded the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation; the AFL-CIO Working for America Institute; the National Council of La Raza; and Physicians for Social Responsibility, among numerous other radical groups.
Meanwhile, the NPV leadership is comprised of Democratic Party supporters.
The organization’s chairman, Koza, who has reportedly pledged $12 million to NPV, previously gave tens of thousands of dollars to various Democratic Party committees and liberal candidates and was an Al Gore elector in 2000, the Weekly Standard reported.
Another pledged NPV leader is Tom Golisano, founder and chairman of Paychex, the nation’s second largest payroll and human resource company. Golisano is a registered Republican, even though he supported John Kerry and gave $1 million to the Democratic National Convention in 2008.