At a forum Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell attacked the National Popular Vote campaign’s leadership as “eccentric.”
An obscure but well-funded campaign to reinvent the Electoral College and elect the president via a national popular vote has alarmed GOP leaders, who have mounted a counterattack with the help of a newly revived nonprofit.
The fight over the Electoral College is "the most important issue in America nobody's talking about," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said at a Wednesday forum co-sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and the State Government Leadership Foundation, a GOP-friendly nonprofit that has recently unveiled a new website and ramped up its operations.
The National Popular Vote campaign would replace the Electoral College system, which assigns electors to states based on the size of their Congressional delegations and requires a candidate to win at least 270 of 538 electoral votes to become president. Eight states and the District of Columbia have enacted laws that would instead deliver their Electoral College slates to the candidate who won the most popular votes nationwide. The laws will go into effect when enough states pass similar legislation to break the 270-vote threshold.
The popular vote movement is being spearheaded by "two eccentric businessmen and one of George Soros' sons," McConnell declared at the forum, which featured comments by a half-dozen secretaries of state and by election lawyer and former Federal Election Commissioner Hans von Spakovsky.
McConnell added: "They are as well-funded, unfortunately, as they are well-organized, and they are getting close to the finish line." Advocates of what's known as the National Popular Vote Compact say they have 49 percent of the 270 electoral votes they would need to change the way the president is elected.
The movement's leading backers are National Popular Vote and FairVote, a government watchdog group that promotes election equity across the board. National Popular Vote is chaired by John Koza, a computer scientist, professor and software company co-founder, and backed by businessman and philanthropist Tom Golisano, founder and chairman of the payroll and human resource company Paychex.
FairVote's popular vote plan won over a long list of environmental, labor and civil rights groups in the wake of the contested 2000 presidential election, which delivered the national popular vote to Democratic nominee Al Gore but made George W. Bush president based on electoral votes after the Supreme Court intervened to stop recounts in Florida.
FairVote has received funding from a group now known as the Open Society Foundations, a project of Democrat-friendly investor George Soros, and from Soros' son, Jonathan Soros. But organizers for both groups said the National Popular Vote plan has support on both sides of the aisle.
"This is, to me, a nonpartisan issue," said GOP Committeeman Saul Anuzis, former chairman of the Michigan GOP and a consultant to National Popular Vote. "It's a question of what is the right way to elect a president. In every other office in the land, we elect the person who gets the most votes, from dog catcher to governor."
Rep. Bill Cassidy has his blood drawn by Alesha Barbour during a free hepatitis screening in the Rayburn House Office Building hosted by the Congressional Viral Hepatitis Caucus to recognize "National Viral Hepatitis Testing Day."
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