Richard Helppie:
Hello and welcome to the Common Bridge. We have a couple of really great guests today. Trent England is the executive director of Save Our States. He’s previously served as executive vice president for both the Oklahoma Council Of Public Affairs and The Freedom Foundation and was a legal policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation. Trent was a Publius Fellow of the Claremont Institute in 2008. He is the author of Why We Must Defend The Electoral College and a contributor to The Heritage Guide to the Constitution and One Nation Under Arrest. Trent earned his JD from the George Mason University School of Law. He has a BA in government from Claremont McKenna College.
Also with us today is Scott Drexel. Scott is a longtime advisor to some of the country’s most active Democratic donors, activists, and business leaders. He serves on finance committees for several national democratic committees and has been active in the campaigns of numerous candidates. He’s worked in over 30 states on behalf of the National Popular Vote.
Gentlemen, welcome to the Common Bridge. We’re delighted that you’ve taken some time to spend with us. Scott, can you tell us about the National Popular Vote and specifically, why does it exist? Who founded it? How is it funded? What’s the annual budget, and what would be a successful outcome for your organization, and what is your role? And I do want to direct people to the website, NationalPopularVote.com too. And we’ll put that on our website, RichardHelppie.com. Scott, can you fill us in about your organization the National Popular Vote?
Scott Drexel:
Sure. National Popular Vote, we got started back in 2006, actually. So at its core, the National Popular Vote is exactly what it sounds like. It is a piece of state-based legislation that would guarantee the White House to the candidate who receives the most votes in all 50 States and the District of Columbia. So as I mentioned, we got started in 2006. That was six years after the less recent of the two more recent wrong way presidential elections in 2000-in Bush vs Gore, and 10 years before the most recent in 2016 between Secretary Clinton and President Trump. The idea behind National Popular Vote had less to do with the individual outcome of those two elections and far more to do with really two base concepts of American public life and democracy and government, which is every vote should be equal. And the person with the most votes should win. So the way National Popular Vote works is an agreement between the states that any enacting state that passes the National Popular Vote bill would award its electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote across all 50 States and the District of Columbia with a very special trigger on it. The law would not take effect until states representing the majority of the electoral college have opted into the same agreement. So far today 15 states and the District of Columbia, which together account for 196 electoral votes have passed the bill and enacted into law. That’s 74 electoral votes shy of the 270 electoral votes needed to put it into effect. So nothing happens at this point. The bill sits on the books in those 15, 16, and growing number of jurisdictions, until the total number reaches 270, once it does the candidate with the most votes in all 50 States and the District of Columbia wins.
Richard Helppie:
And how is National Popular Vote funded, and how does it get it sorts of funding and what’s its annual budget?
Scott Drexel:
Sure. It’s a C4. We operate with contributions from a network of individuals. The primary funder has been a gentleman named John Koza, who also was the originator and the author of the National Popular Vote bill. But over the course of the last 14 years, he’s been joined by a number of Democratic, Republican, Independent leaning donors who’ve funded our efforts over the years. I won’t get too much into our annual budget. But I think that primary use of it is our national team working with local activist groups and legislators on the grounds in the states where we’re actively pursuing enactments and educating members of legislators who aren’t that familiar with National Popular Vote about why the current system poses a number of disadvantageous problems and why the National Popular Vote would be a solution to them.
Richard Helppie:
Trent, Save Our States. Why does your organization exist? Who founded it, how’s it funded and what would be a successful outcome for your organization? And of course we will not only make mention of NationalPopularVote.com, but the website SaveOurStates.com and we’ll post both of those links on our website, RichardHelppie.com. So tell us about Save Our States.
Trent England:
So I created Save Our States back in 2009, really as a side project. I was working in other areas of public policy, some on election law but also on things like government transparency and criminal justice reform. But I had an interest in the electoral college going back to the 1990s when I was in college and just this fascination with an institution that’s so little understood, and I came to believe, really plays a very fundamental role in shaping our politics in creating these incentives that force the national political parties to operate in a certain way that then echoes down through our political system. And so when National Popular Vote popped up in 2006, I started tracking their effort and frankly became very concerned for two different reasons that I’m sure we’ll get into. One I think the electoral college is a better system than a direct election when it comes to the national executive. I think that’s why countries like India and Germany use the electoral college type systems. I think that’s a smart way to elect that particular national officer, but also I think the National Popular Vote plan has some very specific drawbacks that really created a lot of concern for me in my work in other areas of election law. And as I say, I’m sure we’ll get into some of those details. So I launched Save Our States to educate people about the electoral college, and also specifically to explain why I think this National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is really particularly risky. And I think, as I say, I’m sure we’ll explore some of that.
Richard Helppie:
Tell us about your funding sources and what kind of spending you have with your organization.
Trent England:
We’re a non-profit, an educational non-profit actually based at another educational non-profit here in Oklahoma, and our budget on average, it ebbs and flows, but it’s in the hundreds of thousands of dollars-on average, under a million dollars. We did, we made a documentary film called Safeguard, an Electoral College Story over the last year. So our budget probably peaked up around a million dollars to do that project. And it comes from individual donors and a handful of foundation donors.
Richard Helppie:
Gentlemen, this could be a semester long course, and we’re going to try to give the listeners to the Common Bridge most of the information we can in an hour’s time. And indeed when this podcast airs on October 27th, we’re already going to be in a situation where millions of people have cast their ballots, and many others are preparing to cast their ballots. And I think most people understand that the vote that they cast on that date or that they’ve already cast, will be to vote for electors, and that the governors will provide Certificates of Ascertainment, hopefully by December 14th. And then by January 6th, they will be delivered to a joint session of Congress to count the votes and declare the winner before inauguration day. Trent, you believe that the electoral college is a great way to select our president. Why is that?
Trent England:
Well, as I mentioned, other countries use similar systems, I think that’s a good place to start because there’s winners and losers in elections. And that’s the problem right now-it’s not just that the Democrats tend to dislike the electoral college because of these couple of elections, but Republicans tend to dislike the electoral college because of 2016, too. So it’s a partisan issue on both sides, even for a lot of people who agree with me. But if you look at a country like India, both India and Germany created their electoral college type systems in the mid 20th century for similar reasons: they’re big, they’re diverse. Germany was obviously coming out of World War II. They did not want to create an opportunity for the rise of another Adolf Hitler. India is even bigger. It’s the biggest democracy in the world. It’s very diverse. And by creating a two-step election process, you force your political parties and your national candidates to take into consideration the views of more of your people spread out across your country. It uses geography as a proxy for diversity, which works pretty well because where you live-different states have very different demographic profiles and economic interests. And so the electoral college forces our political parties to be truly national. The Democrats are only a credible political party because they’re already popular in a lot of states. They’re already popular in California and in New York and a lot of places, and they have to then work from there to win additional people over in additional states and likewise for the Republicans. So it creates this incentive not just in an individual election, but this long term incentive to build coalitions. That’s again, that’s why India does it, that’s why Germany does that. And it also, in our system, it allows us to push power down into the states to keep states in control of elections. We never have a nationwide recount. If there’s a problem in a state it’s contained in that state, we don’t have the President in charge of presidential elections, all that power is pushed down into the states. I think that also is really important. So those are the two biggest reasons why I think the electoral college, that two-step democratic system-just like it serves India well and Germany and parliamentary systems well-I think it serves us very well in the United States.
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