Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter discusses North Carolina’s flirtation with the electoral-vote-by-congressional-district idea in his latest column.
Alter spells out interesting objections, then lapses into support for an even worse idea: turning over electoral votes to the national popular-vote winner.
As critics have explained, such a scheme leads to only two possibilities. In the first case, the national popular-vote winner secures electoral votes he already would have won under existing rules by virtue of winning the state’s popular vote. In the second case, the new rules would force the state to reject the will of its people in assigning electoral votes to a candidate the state did not support.
