Our guests include Terry Madonna, director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs and professor of public affairs at Franklin and Marshall College. He is a fierce critic of the idea, arguing it would rob Pennsylvania of influence and attention in the presidential sweepstakes. "Good-bye national battleground, hello national has-been!" Madonna wrote in a recent Politically Uncorrected column. He favors Congress passing an amendment to abolish the Electoral College and elect the president by a national popular vote.
Maine and Nebraska, not exactly national leaders in population or political movements, are the only states to have adopted the congressional district-winner approach to electors. Nine states have joined rival efforts to pass the National Popular Vote bill which would ensure that each state's electoral votes go to the national popular-vote winner. A candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win the presidency. The NPV backers now have 132 of the 270 electoral votes needed to enforce it.
Charlie Gerow, CEO of Quantum Communications, a conservative who served in Pres. Reagan's administration, is one of the architects of the Pileggi plan. Gerow will make his case on the show. He argues that the congressional district approach would "protect the integrity of each Pennsylvanian's vote for president." Dr. James Broussard, a professor at Lebanon Valley College, offers a strong argument in favor of the congressional-district method of selecting a president.
Charlie Greenawalt, a senior fellow of the Susquehanna Valley Center for Public Policy in Hershey and also professor of government and political affairs at Millersville University, is a guest. He notes that only two times in U.S. history - 1888 and 2000 - has the national popular-vote winner failed to win the Electoral College vote. He recently wrote in defense of the oft-maligned Electoral College, "Without the Electoral College and the two political parties, the incentive to create broad-based coalitions to capture a majority in 20 or 30 states would be considerably reduced. Hence, post-election governance would be more difficult. A president would have a much smaller base of popular support, but he would have to deal with a Congress composed of people with no party attachment whose primary purpose is to advance a particular group or a regional interest. Indeed, the Electoral College, encourages a two party system, and this system moderates conflict and promotes effective post-election governance."
And Tim Potts, co-founder of the grassroots, good-government group, Democracy Rising PA, rounds out our panel. He questions whether Pileggi would be pushing this idea if the Republicans weren't in control of redistricting. Potts favors a nationally uniform system of electoral-vote allotment. At a recent press conference decrying the proposal, Potts said, "Our one national election is for the President and Vice President of the United States. We believe, therefore, that we should have one set of rules for our one national election because our one nation is still the United States of America, not the Confederate Territories of America. We do not object to every form of proportional allocation of electoral votes. There are good arguments to make for such a system. However, if that is going to happen, it should happen according to a national standard that applies to all 50 states, and it should happen in a way that does not give an advantage to any political party."
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