Area or it was donald trump before he changed his mind a few times. He also said this i would rather see it where you went with simple votes. You know you get 100 million votes and someone else gets 90 million and you when. I quote him not for irony but because he is right and his affinity for the popular vote may reflect his instinct that a president who was elected without winning a majority is perhaps not so legitimate. Think of all the factors that have contributed to voter cynicism and alienation. Of all the measures that we could institute to help restore confidence in democracy. This is the one that can be easily he remedied. And have it enormous impact. Suddenly, everyones vote would count the same. Truly one person one vote area voters all over the country not just in florida, michigan, wisconsin, and pennsylvania would determine the outcome of the election. Americans are very close right now to changing the system. To having a popular vote for president. How would such a system change american political campaigns . That is why we are here. Welcome to a conference called when every vote counts. Im jim glassman im a member of the board of directors of making every vote count. A nonprofit organizations aim is to educate americans about the electoral system. This is a nonpartisan effort. I am a registered republican. I served as undersecretary of state the george w. Bush administration and i headed president bushs policy institute that is part of the president ial library in dallas. We have republicans and democrats and independents on our board all concerned about the future of democracy under our current electoral system. In five elections, two of them since 2000, we have elected president s who were defeated in the popular vote area if donald trump wins again, it is highly likely that his election will be the sixth and the third in six elections. Americans by an overwhelming majority reject the Current System. We know that from poland that stretches back for decades. The latest survey in july by andrew cluster found that 71 of voters nationally say that the candidate who gets the most votes nationwide should be the president. Only 21 oppose the idea. Among republicans, there is a majority of 61 to 32. Thats a two to one majority nearly. Whether we should change the rules so the candidate who wins the most votes becomes the president , u. S. Voters agreed by a margin of 65 to 26. With the majority of republicans agreeing. He has pulled many states including right red ones and gotten similar results for example, north dakota. There are too many red or states in north dakota and they are 64 of likely voters including 55 of republicans agree that the candidate who gets the most votes nationwide should become the president area and we also found that the majority of north dakota voters polled would vote yes in a Ballot Initiative that said that their electoral votes would go to the National Popular vote winner immediately in the 2020 election as long as a blue state with the same number of electoral votes also approved such a measure. Think about that. We know that the Current System is not how we should approve choose our leaders. Millions dont understand it and it deprives millions more of a meaningful vote. 100 million americans dont vote for president at all. Can you blame them . When just a dozen or maybe just for five will determine who that person will be. We choose all of our other elected officials the same way. Whoever gets the most votes wins. Every person has an equal vote. Why dont we choose president s that way . Mainly because the framers could not agree so they punted. They left the choice to the states. The constitution says each state shall appoint in such manner as the Legislature Thereof May direct a number of electors etc. The criteria for that appointment area did in the early years of the republic, many state legislators themselves and the appointing. Not the voters. Now, every state but to chooses electors the same way with a vote taking all the electors. Over the past several decades, red and blue voters have become more and more concentrated by state. Few states are purple. Candidates focus only on those states and when president s get elected, they shower those states with attention and in many cases money. We see this over and over. In 2016, there were 399 Public Campaign events. 94 of them were in just 12 states. The other states had three or fewer events. The majority of states had zero events area there are several ways to reform the method of electing a president. A number of Democratic Candidates for president have said that they prefer a constitutional amendment. Maine has enacted rank Choice Voting for the 2020 general election. Under a recent 10th Circuit Court decision, a electors can decide without regard to the wishes of the voters they want to be present. 15 states plus the district of columbia have passed the National Popular vote interstate compact which goes into effect when it is law and states that account for 270 electoral votes. So far, the total is 196. This change in the way we vote backed by a solid majority of americans in surveys is close to becoming reality. It is now a matter of only a few years until the person who gets the most votes will become president area we decided it was time to take a look not at the merits of the popular vote that at how president ial campaigns would be run if the person who gets the most votes nationwide is the one who becomes president. There is a lot of mythology around this question. What are the political implications . What are the Campaign Mechanics . We have just the right people to do it. Todays agenda briefly, we have a first panel in just a few seconds. They will examine how will candidates try to win under a National Popular vote. Moderated by my friend Steve Clemons editor at large at the hill. The second panel, how will the candidates messages and platforms change because of the popular vote . That will be motivated by bob cusack the editor in chief of the hill eerie at that will be followed by a keynote address by the secretary of state of rhode island. We will start Steve Clemons. Good morning. I am editor at large of the hill. It is a pleasure to follow jim. We have a lineup coming up to talk about how the National Popular vote would work. What behaviors that would change. We have a wonderful panel this morning. Mark, the president of the stack will group. To my farleft is dr. Samuel wong. Thank you all for joining us. We have a task this morning to have fun with this. Were going to engage in conversation and create some hypotheticals that if our system were to change, what sort of behaviors would we see . Mark, you and i have done as a couple of times together and i was excited because when we were at the republican convention, we began talking about different flavors of ice cream. You end up with two flavors of ice cream and one may be rocky road. They said oh no, he has moved to fish and chicken worried i said maybe we can talk about varieties of fish and chicken or how people are going to fish differently. Are they going to fish instead of one place or three places in a broader part of the chesapeake day. Now i understand you have moved to potatoes. Were excited to hear about the potato analogy. Can you help set the stage on the topic of if we were to deploy a National Popular vote, how would you see candidates and behaviors change . I thought it would be most useful to give you an overview of the numbers of the Current System and how it works and how it has been working in recent years. That is to help move the discussion along. I was always told by president clinton he would like to have a story that people related to. I like food stories. Would you talk it back with him . Mostly the sandwich energy. I want to give you another concept. Im going to start out with the couch potato voter. What is the couch potato voter . Those are the 94 million americans who are eligible to vote but dont vote. If you look at the biggest problem in the system, the biggest problem in the system is as that site has grown to be so big, campaigns have changed so that rather than focusing as i did back in the day when i ran a lot of campaigns for the swing voters, people instead try to go for the extreme and get just their slice of the couch out. If everybody voted, the entire couch would vote. What would actually happen if the entire couch did vote . To do that, based on a New York Times analysis, you will be able to see the slide in the street but what difference would it make if everybody voted in america . Primarily, of the 94 million, there are tremendous numbers of latinos who are not in the political system. They probably percentagewise rank as the Number One Group not voting. You would be surprised at the huge numbers of downscale voters particularly downscale white who dont vote approximately 60 million. Caution people who say they want everyone in america to vote. If everyone in america did vote, if we had not just a change in the Electoral College but a more australian system where everyone voted, you would be surprised that the change in the con composition of the electorate and quite possibly the outcome. Most people who are on the couch dont like any of the politicians eerie at they are right now making an affirmative choice i think there are a lot of people of the 94 million who simply dont like any of the politicians and they are highly volatile voters when they come in. When you take a look at the system, you see this enormous gap that continues between approximately 130 million who vote and the swing voters in the country who are typically middleaged suburban middleclass and i have always recorded as about 20 of the country. You also have to look at our primary system. There is a lot a focus on what about the outcome of the election . It turns out that typically, not huge numbers of people have voted in the primaries in the past. An average of about 35 million voters. If you take a hundred 30 million general election voters and the 226 million actually eligible to vote, the primary system then is being driven on the basis of about 35 million or 17. 5 million on either side. We have had some really contested primaries and you can see bumps up so the total can get into the 50s. That would still give you 25 million on each side. When you think about that, when you look at politics by the numbers, we have about 321 Million People in the country last time i did this slide it might be 330 by now. We have about 226 Million People eligible to vote. Meaning they meet all of the qualifications. We have about 94 million who actually dont vote and therefore are eligible, the couch potato voters. We have 130 million approximately, about 35 million who book in a primary. 17. 5 million who vote on each side. That means that in the primary system, it takes about 10 million voters to get the nominee. About 20 million voters actually are the ones who determine the future for the other 321 million voters when you look at the entire system. I dont lay this out for a partisan reason other than i think you should always start out with how is the system working . Who is voting . Where does it count . Where is the biggest cap between who votes and the decisions that are made . I should have mentioned, i also want to say hello to you in the audience but we also have these been here and its terrific to have them and im sure they will kick the tires on your numbers and im sure you will hear about whether your right or wrong. I thought it would come at this point and you and i have this point and you and i have discussed previously that if you had a shift in the natural popular vote, to imagine the playbook for running an election would be different. I am interested in what behaviors you would see and i want to mention another donald trump quote, he said if you go by the Electoral College, that is a very different race than running the popular vote its like a hundred yard versus the mile. I stole this from an article in salon. In this he is looking at the different muscles you would use. Given what mark said about the couch potato voter and others who might be brought in, what would you see is some of the Campaign Strategy differences that you would employ . Because you are talking about a much greater geography and audience size that the campaign would need to talk to, it would cost a lot more. Campaigns would then, suddenly you have to be pulling in california and new york regularly. It would cost more from a staff standpoint and advertising. Given the hard dollar fundraising limits, i dont think campaigns should focus at all on broadcast ads. Let the super pacs and dark money groups take that over then campaigns would more look more and more toward modeling. We are seeing more candidates on all levels is that a good thing . I think so because youre getting more individualized. Figuring out what individuals really care about them talk to the issues that they care about and mobilize them to get out to vote or to persuade them on those issues. Right now in north dakota which was a case that jim raised, how would you suspect that a campaign right now is not much play in that state as a battleground state, give me a story that you might see unfold as to how a voter there would weigh more in the next election with National Popular vote then we have today . Candidates would actually be looking to pull them and to model what they put out. They know a voter in north dakota cares about health care and they can direct those ads to those individuals. Then those voters will hear from the candidates on the issues they really care about. , dr. Wong, let me jump to you. If you are looking at this time of close elections and simulated scenarios of how they can get resolved in the future, i am interested in how you see the impact coming on board . In addition to founding the consortium, i am a Laboratory Scientist and scientists should not be involved in this but democracy has gotten complicated. I want to show some bugs in the electoral system. Unanticipated weaknesses. This is cspan so we can show slides its very exciting for an academic to show visuals. I read a Research Laboratory at Princeton University and i want to show some real and mythical laws in the Electoral College. I want to hopefully replace some false belief that people have. The reason we care some much about the Electoral College, this is a graph of the popular margin of whoever became president back to john quincy adams. The reason we care about this is if you look below the black horizontal line, there is a time in the 19th century we had racial divisions and technological disruption and deep partisanship. Then we had to popular vote losers become president. That time sounds familiar to us. We have a time today where we have racial divisions, technological disruption, increase in inequality and deep partisanship. Two out of the last five elections, the person with the most popular votes did not become president. I want to show you know in the next slide that in close elections, there is a one in three chance that the popular vote winner will not become president and this can go in either direction. If this is not from the so if you want to read more about it, you can read at my website. Not only with modeling but also with actual data, taking this Historical Data going through bush versus gore and others, if the election was is within three Percentage Points of the popular vote, there is a one in three chance that the popular vote winner will not become president. If john kerry had pulled out a win in ohio, he would have been president in 2004. Our conversation would have a slightly different tenor today. It could go either direction and that one in three risk is rather large in my opinion. There is a believe, if we have a National Popular vote we would end up with a system in which votes on the coast would end of determining the presidency. I want to show you that this is not the case. This is a graph of what fraction of the Hillary Clinton plus donald trump vote is one by state. On the horizontal axis, its the number of states and you can see here in the lower corner, california only provides 7 of the necessary 50 . Add new york, florida, texas, texas would provide some of those votes. You have to go to all the way to 41 states plus d. C. Before you end up with enough votes to give Hillary Clinton more than donald trump. The second voting entity that puts her over half of the twoparty vote is rhode island. This is a situation in which rhode island votes and up mattering. This is important from the popular belief that its really coastal states that will end up providing the states votes. Rural voters in california are disempowered. World voters all over the country are disempowered because they dont matter because they arent in swim stakes swing states. I want to emphasize that those beliefs are not correct. This is again something the people perhaps have not bought up. Foreign interference and elections is very much on peoples minds of these days. You cant avoid it. Having a few swing states, having the election decided in florida and pennsylvania and ohio, maybe this year and next year in arizona, michigan, wherever it might be that opens up a villa vulnerability to hacking. A natural National Popular vote can have a margin in the millions. If we have a close election, the number of votes that need to be flipped in order to alter the outcome is smaller. On the right side, the big bars are the popular vote for trump versus clinton and others. Were going back in time here. These are elections where tens of thousands or millions of votes would need to be flipped in order to alter the outcome of the president ial election. If you look