Mary Helen Garcia
We live in the world’s greatest democracy, yet the U.S. Constitution does not provide for the popular vote of our president by all Americans. Bizarre as this may sound, it is true. The American people do not decide who their leader is – the Electoral College does.
Article II of the constitution created the Electoral College and conferred to state legislatures the power to allocate their electoral votes. All but two states (Maine and Nebraska) have adopted the “winner-take-all” approach to allocating electoral votes.
What this means is that all the electoral votes in a state (a number equal to the state’s representation in Congress, which in New Mexico totals five electoral votes: two for our two U.S. senators, and three for our three U.S. representatives) are allocated to the winner of the state presidential vote, regardless of the margin of victory.
This creates a distorted election, which has on four occasions in U.S. history resulted in an individual being sworn into the office of president who did not win the national popular vote, but did manage to achieve a majority of votes in the Electoral College. The most recent occasion of this was in 2000.
In four of 56 presidential elections, we have had a president in office who did not receive the most votes of the American people. This is an absurd result, particularly in this day and age. Our president should be elected on the basis of receiving more votes cast by the American people than any other candidate in the race.
In an effort to correct this distortion of our presidential election, I sponsored House Memorial 56, which was passed by the full House on March 15, and which calls upon the New Mexico secretary of state to study and compare our current Electoral College system with a new system of allocating electoral votes called the National Popular Vote System.
Under the National Popular Vote system, all of a state’s electoral votes would be awarded to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. If adopted by New Mexico, this process would take effect only when enacted by enough states to reach a majority of the electoral votes – that is, enough electoral votes to elect a president (270).
All New Mexicans, Democrat, Republican, tea party, or otherwise, should have confidence that our president is elected by the people. To have otherwise is a distortion of the democratic principles that are meant to ensure the people, not a select few, choose their president.
Garcia, a Democrat from Las Cruces, represents District 34 in the N.M. House of Representatives and is chair of the Voters and Elections Committee. A prior version of this posting incorrectly stated that the Senate had not approved the proposal. Because it was a House memorial, it needed no Senate approval. The House, in approving the memorial, has formally called on the secretary of state to study the system. The mistake was NMPolitics.net’s, not Rep. Garcia’s.