WND EXCLUSIVE
http://www.wnd.com/2013/07/devious-election-plot-bypasses-constitution/
The National Popular Vote effort, which could see only 14 states – those with the largest populations – decide the presidency for voters in all 50 states, is fully partnered with a George Soros-funded election group.
The group, the Center for Voting and Democracy, received original seed money in 1997 from the Joyce Foundation, a non-profit that boasted President Obama served on its board at the time of the grant. Obama was a board member from July 1994 until December 2002.
The National Popular Vote, or NPV, is run by individuals with a history of support for the Democratic Party, WND found.
Last week, the Washington Post reported NPV is “now halfway to its goal of electing future presidents via the popular vote, after Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee (D) made his state the latest to sign on.”
The Post story described NPV as a campaign seeking to “get states that comprise a majority of the 538 votes in the Electoral College –270, to be precise – to agree to award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote.”
The states will not be required to award their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner until NPV has signed up enough states to garner 270 electoral votes.
The Founding Fathers firmly rejected a purely popular vote to elect the president because they wanted to balance the power of the larger states against the smaller.
The Electoral College was fashioned as a compromise between an election of the president by direct popular vote and election by Congress.
Now the NPV effort could change the way Americans vote without amending the U.S. Constitution. The plan simply requires that enough states sign up by voting in their own legislatures and then having their governors approve.
It takes two-thirds of both the House and Senate to pass a constitutional amendment to repeal the Electoral College.
To bypass the constitutional amendment process, NPV minimizes the number of states that would need to agree. Instead, once enough states agree to allot their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, the Electoral College becomes irrelevant.
With the addition of Rhode Island to the NPV effort, the pact now has nine states plus the District of Columbia for a total of 136 of the 270 electoral votes needed. The other states signed up are Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Washington, Vermont and California.
NPV is partnered with FairVote, a project of the Soros-funded Center for Voting and Democracy.
FairVote’s website expounds on its relationship with NVP:
FairVote advocates for a national popular vote for president, and has nurtured and supported the National Popular Vote plan to ensure that every vote for president is equally valued no matter where it is cast.
FairVote’s executive director Rob Richie co-authored Every Vote Equal, a book explaining how the National Popular Vote plan would work and why the United States desperately needs it, and Fairvote regularly works with advocacy leaders at the National Popular Vote organization to assist in getting to important legislation passed.
Richie, executive director of FairVote since he co-founded it in 1992, is also a member of the civil society committee of the Soros-led Bretton Woods Committee, which openly seeks to remake the world economy.
Richie’s book “Every Vote Equal: A State-Based Plan for Electing the President by National Popular Vote” was co-authored with the NPV’s founder, John R. Koza.
In a Dec. 15, 2008, Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Jonathan Soros, son of George Soros, wrote that it was time to junk the Electoral College.
Soros’s Open Society Institute funds the Center for Voting and Democracy, where FairVote is based.
The center’s website notes the group was kick-started in 1997 with two grants – one from the Open Society and another from the Joyce Foundation.
With Obama on its board, the Joyce Foundation also funded the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation; the AFL-CIO Working for America Institute; the National Council of La Raza and Physicians for Social Responsibility, among numerous other radical groups.
Meanwhile, the NPV leadership is comprised of Democratic Party supporters.
The organization’s chairman and major funder is John R. Koza. He was the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Scientific Games Inc., where he co-invented the rub-off instant lottery ticket used by state lotteries.
Koza, who has reportedly pledged $12 million to NPV, previously gave tens of thousands of dollars to various Democratic Party committees and liberal candidates and was an Al Gore elector in 2000, the Weekly Standard reported.
Another pledged NPV leader is Tom Golisano, founder and chairman of Paychex, the nation’s second largest payroll and human resource company. He co-founded the Independence Party of New York in 1994 and ran as the party’s gubernatorial candidate.
Golisano is a registered Republican, even though he supported John Kerry and gave $1 million to the Democratic National Convention in 2008.
NPV’s secretary, Chris Pearson, served in the Vermont House of Representatives in 2006. In 2005, he was director of the Presidential Election Reform program at the Soros-funded FairVote.
With additional research by Brenda J. Elliott
Authored By Victor Morton – The Washington Times – Tuesday, December 6, 2016
What Did You Say? 
Clinton appears to have won the national popular vote in 2016, primarily fueled by massive landslides in populous Democratic states like California and New York. This has sparked efforts to do away with the state-based and not entirely democratic Electoral College.
Though a huge part of the anti-Electoral College push is sour grapes in the wake of a surprise electoral defeat, it serves the broader interest of the progressive movement’s goal to both delegitimize the incoming administration and subvert the idea of federalism as enshrined in the Constitution.
Electoral College Worked in 2016
The Electoral College was carefully designed by the Founders after lengthy deliberation at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. The design is this: Americans don’t cast their vote for president, but instead for electors pledged to their preferred candidate. Each state has a set number of electors based on the total number of representatives and senators. You can read about why the Founders created this seemingly complex system here.
Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, who was fairly popular with progressives just a week ago, supported the Electoral College process in Federalist 68. He said that “if the manner of it be not perfect, it is at least excellent.”
But a number of prominent Democrats have ignored Hamilton and called for an end to the Electoral College post-election.
Opponents of the Electoral College claim that the institution is fundamentally flawed. The fact that the winner of the most recent presidential contest didn’t have the highest total vote further demonstrates why it needs to be scrapped, according to their logic.
This narrative couldn’t be farther from the truth, as the issues surrounding the election prove exactly why the Electoral College is such an excellent system for the United States.
For instance, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein is leading a movement to recount votes in three key states that Trump won: Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. This was in part justified by the idea that Russia had tampered with the election.
The recount process will likely be messy, but it would be vastly more complicated if America had to undergo a national as opposed to state-level recount. Votes have trickled in for the last month, and it is possible that without the state-based system it might still be unclear who the next president would be.
As ugly as the 2016 election was, it would have been far uglier without the moderating, stable process afforded by the Electoral College.
Having states conduct their own elections is a strength of our system, not a weakness. For instance, without the Electoral College and respect for state powers, it would be difficult for America to experiment with solutions to prevent voter fraud. This should be a priority for those suddenly concerned about voting integrity.
Assault on Federalism
What is lost in the Electoral College debate is the underlying attack on America’s cherished and inherited idea of federalism.
The Founders in their wisdom designed this republic with the intent of checking ambition with ambition, and delegating specific powers to both the national as well as state governments. They created a nation in which states could operate independently, experimenting with different policies and laws to fit their people.
The elimination of the Electoral College would be just another blow to the role of the states in the American system of government. No longer would presidential candidates have to appeal to the farmers of rural Iowa alongside the bankers of urban New York. They would be incentivized to campaign directly to the interests of the largest population centers alone.
The reasoning used to abolish the Electoral College could easily be applied to some of the most important aspects of America’s constitutional republic.
If the Electoral College is simply an ancient, undemocratic, and defunct relic of the Founding, then why isn’t the Senate? After all, treating the states equally and allowing them only two senators regardless of population is silly if one thinks the states hold no special place in our system. One writer was open about this in a Washington Post op-ed calling for abolishing the states entirely.
Samuel concluded:
This is the essential issue at the heart of the Electoral College that extends far beyond the results of a single election.
The left wants to fundamentally change the system of federalism so venerated and protected by the founding generation. But those who believe that the United States was built on timeless ideas about man’s relation to man should look to preserve the system that allowed America to rise to the status of a superpower while preserving individual liberty.