SACRAMENTO -- A national movement aimed at sidelining the Electoral College in presidential elections got a big boost Monday when Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation adding California to the list of states supporting the drive.
Brown's signature makes California the ninth state to sign on to the effort, which would hand the electoral votes of all participating states to the presidential candidate who wins the most votes nationwide. Currently, California's 55 electoral votes go to the person who wins the most votes in the state.
Under the new law, most California voters could choose one candidate, but the state's electoral votes could ultimately go to the competitor; however, it also would make it impossible for a president to win an election without a majority of support nationally.
It's unlikely the change would take place in time for the 2012 election. Under federal law, states representing a majority of electoral votes - 270 out of 538 - have to agree in order to shift the way votes are awarded in those states.
California's involvement, combined with the other eight states, brings supporters nearly halfway there, to 132 votes, said Vikram David Amar, associate dean at the UC Davis School of Law. Amar, along with his brother and another law professor, started the movement a decade ago.
"It's about voter equality," he said. "If you don't have a national popular vote, people in some states have more say than people in other states."
Currently, he said, swing states get "all the campaign promises and attention, and their votes are effectively worth more."
Amar and other supporters note that a handful of swing states usually get all of the attention from candidates on both sides of the aisle, while large states such as New York, California and Texas are virtually ignored in presidential contests - unless candidates need to raise money.
Other laws vetoed
Authored by Assemblyman Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, identical measures have twice been passed by lawmakers but were vetoed in 2006 and 2008 by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican.
But Hill and Amar argue it's not a partisan issue - though it has broken down that way in California. The bill at one point had four Republican co-authors, but those legislators stripped their names from the measure after some GOP activists argued that the change would not be in the party's best interest, in part because it could lead to the Democratic Party spending big in the Golden State. Ultimately, only two Republican lawmakers voted for the measure in California.
Amar, however, noted that in 2000, Democratic candidate Al Gore won the national popular vote and lost the electoral college. Four years later, President George W. Bush, a Republican, won 3 million more popular votes than his Democratic challenger, John Kerry - but if just 60,000 people had swung toward Kerry in Ohio, the Democrat would have taken the White House.
"The Electoral College is neither red nor blue, it's simply an anachronistic holdover from our (nation's) founding," Amar said, adding that the Republican-controlled New York Senate recently passed the measure, and it will now be considered by the New York Assembly.
Hill echoed that sentiment, saying that "every voter in every state should have a real voice in electing the president," including California's 17 million registered voters.
Red states missing
Amar said it's possible that if momentum keeps building, the change could become enacted by the 2016 race. But he warned that a Republican-leaning state needs to sign on, since all of the nine states that have approved the law so far are solidly blue.
"Because the outcome in Texas is already known, they are ignored just as much as New York and California, so hopefully some big red states understand this is to their advantage to do, too," he said. "If a red state doesn't join it soon, I worry people will misunderstand this as a pro-Democrat, anti-Republican thing when it's not that at all."
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