Codey and Lesniak champion popular vote

That image of presidential candidate Al Gore running up the white flag in the face of the Supreme Court decision of 2000 still mortifies Democrats, particularly Jersey Dems schooled on the battlements of in-your-face politics.

If a candidate can’t be a people’s champion, let the people be their own champions, so runs the logic of populism. At the very least, let the will of the people decide the outcome.

Such is the expressed aim of a bill co-written by State Senators Richard Codey and Raymond Lesniak, which would change how victory is determined in presidential elections, subordinating the electoral vote to the total popular will, or awarding states’ electoral votes - 15, in the case of New Jersey - to the presidential candidate who wins the most popular votes nationwide.

The bill made it out of the Senate State Government Committee meeting today by a vote of 3-0-1. Its ultimate success depends on the mutual participation of states that can amass a majority of electoral votes, or 270, to be precise. So far only Maryland’s signed on to participate with its 10 electoral votes, and Codey and Lesniak hope Jersey and other states follow suit.

As currently conceived, the Electoral College consists of 538 electors distributed throughout the 50 states. The number of electors in each state is equal to the number of U.S. representatives and senators in each state, and is based on population. States with larger populations have more electors, which means that victory in presidential politics requires a candidate to pile up a majority of electoral votes in key states and - so the argument against the college runs - not necessarily target the people themselves across the broad range of the country.

On four occasions in American History the popular vote of all the states combined has run counter to the result produced by the Electoral College.

Depending on one’s temperament and outlook, the college is either the jaded vestige of a mob-fearing attitude best expressed by Alexander Hamilton, "Your people, sir, is a great beast," or a pragmatic safeguard that acts as a check against regions of the country with large populations dominating presidential elections.

"I think the will of the people shouldn’t be denied," says Lesniak. "The Electoral College is an archaic system designed when the Founding Fathers were afraid of the popular vote and were looking to protect their proprietary interests. Those days are long gone."

GOP Assemblyman Michael Patrick Carroll disagrees, and says of the Codey-Lesniak collaboration, "It’s a silly bill. The President of the United States is the President of the United States, not the president of the people of the United States. The point is, the states mean something."

Lesniak opposes the current system on philosophical grounds, but he also can’t resist gritting his teeth over a certain presidential election outcome. 2000. Not only the one that got away, but the one in the opinion of most Democrats that turned into an obnoxious Constitutional interference in the person of George W. Bush.

"We wouldn’t be embroiled in Iraq right now," says Lesniak.

"Mob rule?" says Codey, objecting to the term as a substitute for the will of the majority, but conceding, "Sometimes mob rule is better than what we get."

In any case, "The goal of this bill is to ensure that the will of the people is not denied in the future," Lesniak says.

Of course, if Democrats can refer to 2000 as the year in which the foundational flaws of the current system came most tragically to light as Gore won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College, the Republicans happily highlight the results of the 2004 election. That’s when Bush found himself in an Electoral College dogfight that came down to Ohio - but bested Sen. John Kerry in the popular vote count by 3.5 million votes.

Regardless of which particular party won this or that election, the philosophical lines go deeper than the last seven years.

"All debates are healthy, whether in committee or on the floor," says Senate Minority Leader Leonard Lance. "I will definitely participate in that debate, and I favor the current system."

So does Assemblyman Joseph Pennacchio.

"I think the Founding Fathers were a lot smarter than myself," says the assemblyman. "It was well thought out. It’s a good compromise. We’ve gotten some good people out of this system, including Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan."

But Chris Pearson, a state representative from Vermont and champion of the National Vote Interstate Compact, says it’s time to stop kneeling at the shrine of the founders, and suggests they hastily threw together Section I Article 2 in the waning days of the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

"The current system has several drawbacks, not least of which is that two-thirds of the states sit on the sidelines and watch presidential elections unfold," Pearson told the Senate Government Committee on Thursday. "Two-thirds of the money in the 2004 presidential election was used to influence the votes of people in five states."

Pearson used another stat to back up his argument: the will of the people, as expressed in a routinely updated Gallup Poll, which shows popular support for the popular vote hovering around 65-70%. John Tomicki of the League of American Families, wasn’t impressed, and told the committee to reject the Codey-Lesniak bill.

"If you want to change the voting process, you amend the Constitution," he said.

Chairman Sen. Joseph Coniglio, Sen. Loretta Weinberg and Sen. Nicholas Scutari accepted Pearson’s argument over Tomicki’s. The one person on the committee who didn’t vote in favor of moving the bill was also the lone Republican, Sen. Nicholas Asselta, who abstained.

"Is this not the responsibility of Congress?" Asselta asked Pearson. "Don’t you have issues in Vermont, without having to come down here to push a national issue?"

"We’re a part-time legislature," Pearson said.

"We’re supposed to be," Asselta dead-panned.

Assemblyman Bill Baroni applauds Codey and Lesniak for introducing the issue as a subject for debate, but agreed with Tomicki that a statutory change is at best an escape hatch from what is fundamentally a Constitutional question.

"I think the framers of the Constitution spent a lot of time trying to balance these issues, and we should not tamper with the Electoral College on a state by state basis," says Baroni. "This is a statute, which could be changed by a statute. But it’s a good national discussion that ought to be had."

Codey says he doesn’t have anything against Hamilton, but argues the rightness of his legislation comes down to honoring that simplest of rules in any fair contest: who scores the most, wins.