A ballot measure has been approved in Ohio to direct that the state's electors from the presidential election will vote for the winner of the popular vote rather than the winner in Ohio. This is part of a national movement to circumvent the Electoral College through state initiatives. So far, although it has passed in several states, it has been limited to states that Hillary Clinton carried. The proposed Ohio amendment is an effort to change the way a large swing state is counted. This is a very bad idea.
The Electoral Collage is part of the Constitution. There is a well-known mechanism for amending the Constitution but it requires super-majorities of Congress to pass followed by ratification by a super-majority of state legislatures. The supporters of this know that their chances of passing these hurdles are small and the chance of doing this before the election is non-existent so they have chosen to make an end-run around the Constitution at the state level. The Constitution explicitly forbids agreements between states without the consent of Congress so even if this succeeds it is likely to be overturned in the courts.
There is a twisted irony that supporters want to amend the Ohio Constitution as an end run around the Ohio Legislature in order to circumvent the US Constitution.
While supporters of the measure talk about making every vote count, the initiative is really aimed at helping Democrats in the wake of the 2000 and 2016 elections where the victor of the Electoral College did not win the popular vote. It's worth remembering that Democrats were supportive of the Electoral College when a swing of less than 2% in Ohio would have given John Kerry an Electoral College win. The Electoral was a big factor in Hillary Clinton's "blue wall" that was supposed to deny Donald Trump a path to victory.
Of course the United States is not a direct republic where every vote counts. It is a federation of states and was designed to assure that states with smaller populations have a louder voice so as not to be dominated by a handful of large states. This is even more true today when the population is polarized between the cities and the rest of the country. A map of election results by state is misleading. It's only when you look at it by county or precinct that you see how support for Democrats is limited to high-density areas.
So, a vote is a vote, right? So should it shouldn't matter where the voters are, right? Not exactly. According to the book, Shattered, during the 2016 campaign Bill Clinton wanted to campaign in the suburbs and rural areas but was overridden by Hillary's campaign staff which felt that it wasn't cost-effective. They had calculated that there were enough voters in the cities to give Hillary the win so there was no reason to court rural voters. Even when Hillary did leave the cities, she was still playing for them. At one point she told a group in South-Eastern Ohio that she was going to put a lot of coal miners out of work. She went on to talk about training them for new jobs but everyone listening knew that when the major employer in a small community is eliminated then there are jobs regardless of your training. They knew this, Hillary knew this and they knew that Hillary knew it. She was sending a message to the cities that she was serious about global warming and uttering platitudes about caring for displaced workers so the city people wouldn't feel guilty. Because of this, neighboring West Virginia voted for Trump by a wide margin.
Consider Columbus, Ohio. The population inside the city limits is larger than the three least populated states. The population of the Columbus Metro area (which includes Delaware and Zanesville) is larger than the 15 least populated states and larger than the three smallest states combined. And Columbus is the 32nd largest metro district out of 383. It costs significantly more to campaign in those smaller states than in Columbus so why would any candidate bother? President Trump confirmed this in a tweet talking about the difference between an Electoral campaign and a popular vote one. When all that counts is the popular vote then mostly-rural states will never see a presidential candidate and will have no one representing them.
And let's not even think about the nightmare of a national recount in case of a lose election.
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