Maine’s Legislature has approved a bill that would award its four electoral college votes for U.S. president to the winner of the majority of the national vote.
The Democrat-backed bill was narrowly pushed through the Maine House on April 2 by a 73–72 margin over fierce resistance from Republicans. The state Senate followed suit the day after, approving the bill by a largely party-line 18–12 vote, with state Sen. Matt Pouliot, a Republican, voting in favor while several Democrats opposed it.
It now awaits the approval of Gov. Janet Mills, who has 10 days to either sign, veto, or allow the bill to become law without her signature.
The Democrat governor has yet to say whether she will sign the bill into law. If she chooses to not veto it, Maine will join 15 states and the District of Columbia to adopt the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact—a pledge that their electoral votes go to the presidential candidate with the most overall votes across the nation.
Those states are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. As of now, the pact’s members collectively control 205 electoral votes, 65 votes short of what is needed to send the winner of the national popular vote straight to the White House.
“In 2000, we elected a president who did not get the most votes, and then again in 2016, we elected a president who did not get the most votes,” Maine state Rep. Arthur Bell, the leading sponsor of the bill, said in January. “It’s kind of awkward, and it doesn’t feel right.”
Mr. Bell was referring to former Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump. The former, in 2004, won both the popular and electoral votes and remains the most recent Republican president to have done so. Democrats have won the popular vote in each election since President Bush’s 2004 reelection victory.
“It'll give everyone the same level of vote,” Mr. Bell said, speaking of his proposal. “Your vote is going to count the same as mine and the same as somebody in California or Texas or anywhere else.”
Republicans disagreed. Tying Maine’s electoral votes to how popular a candidate is at a national level, they argued, would make Maine voters’ voices matter less—especially for those in the conservative, rural part of the state.
Condemning the bill as a “shortcut” that “[cheats] the system,” she said that if Democrats want to change the way that Americans elect their presidents, they should push for a constitutional amendment rather than pursuing the interstate compact strategy.
It requires a two-thirds majority in the U.S. Congress to pass a constitutional amendment, in addition to ratification by three-quarters of the states—a considerably higher threshold compared with simply passing a bill in a state Legislature.
“It is a blatant run around the Constitution,” Ms. Libby said. “It shows such a lack of respect for Maine’s people, for the Constitution, and for the founding principles of our country.”
Also among the measure’s critics is Matthew Gagnon, CEO of nonpartisan think tank Maine Policy Institute. Democrats should be careful what they wish for, he said, as their previous efforts to enact sweeping institutional changes for short-term gains have resulted in unintended consequences.
“Remember when Democrats changed the filibuster rules in the Senate in order to ram through Obama-era judicial appointees? Well, that precedent is why the Supreme Court now has a six-to-three conservative majority on it, as Republicans took full advantage,” Mr. Gagnon wrote in an op-ed on April 3.
Calling on the governor to veto the bill, he noted that just because Republicans appear to be on a “losing streak” in terms of winning national popular votes doesn’t mean that this trend will continue indefinitely in future elections.
“Be careful of believing that either party is winning more popular votes in any era simply because they are more popular,” Mr. Gagnon wrote. “If the election was a simple popularity contest, they would’ve run entirely different campaigns, and we will never know how successful those campaigns would’ve been.
“If we are truly to make this change, it needs to be done via a constitutional amendment.
“Mills must veto this legislation.”
