This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
One positive outcome of the 2016 presidential election is that the Utah Legislature will have one less bill to consider during its 45-day session starting in January.
That means fewer debates, fewer committee hearings, fewer opportunities for legislators to bluster and — best of all — fewer lobbyists.
It's settled.
The way the election turned out, there now will be no bill introduced to have Utah join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
The NPVIC is a concept that started about 10 years ago and now has 10 states on board, along with the District of Columbia.
Those NPVIC members — Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois, Hawaii, Washington, Massachusetts, Vermont, California, Rhode Island, New York and Washington, D.C. — have all passed legislation committing them to the compact, which doesn't become effective until enough states have joined to represent 270 electoral votes, the number needed to win the presidency in the Electoral College.
The commitment is that the members pledge all their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote.
The argument against the Electoral College vote determining the president has gone on for nearly two centuries and it has ramped up every time the winner popular vote did not get the presidency.
It has happened five times: In 1824, Andrew Jackson won the popular vote but received less than half of the electoral votes. He lost out to John Quincy Adams.
A few decades later, in 1876, Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote but lost the election by one electoral vote to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. In 1888, Democrat Grover Cleveland also clinched the most popular votes in the country but lost to Republican Benjamin Harrison in the electoral college, 233-168.
In 2000, Democrat Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote to Republican George W. Bush in a race so close it was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
And it has happened again. Democrat Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but, because of the electoral vote, Republican Donald Trump is the president-elect.
Here are some ramifications of the Electoral College winner trumping the popular vote winner.
Adams was an unpopular president and lost to Jackson in a rematch four years later. Hayes was also a one-term president who, because of a back room deal between the Democrats and Republicans to end the contention and award the Republican the presidency, the Democrats got their way in the South and gave us Jim Crow for the next 80 years. Harrison was defeated by Cleveland in a rematch four years later. Bush won re-election in 2004, but left office with an extremely low approval rating after years of war in Iraq and an economy in a deep recession.
Perhaps because in all the elections in which the electoral vote trumped the popular vote the Democrat was on the losing end, only states controlled by Democrats have signed on to the NPVIC.
But Utah was poised to become the first Republican state to join the compact until the election happened. And that changed everything.
Rep. Steve Eliason, R-Sandy, was preparing a bill to have Utah join the compact. Sen. Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, was looking to do the same thing in the Senate. Sen. Curt Bramble, R-Provo, who just completed a term as president of the National Conference of State Legislatures, was going to be the Senate sponsor of Eliason's bill.
The argument was that if the president was elected by popular vote and the Electoral College no longer mattered, Utah as well as other non-swing states would become a player in national elections because every vote would count.
But if the NPVIC had been in place this year, Utah would have been compelled to give its six electoral votes to Hillary Clinton.
How would that have gone over?
Checking in with sources the last few days, I've learned that the NPVIC is dead on arrival in the Beehive State.
Better luck next time. —