By ROGER FULTON

For The Beachcomber

When you vote, you expect the candidate with the most votes to win, right? In almost all cases this is correct, but not so for the election of the president.

We are about to see the end of the term of a president who was the second choice of voters in 2000: George W. Bush. How could this be?

At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, a committee was formed to recommend the method for electing the president. This committee proposed a method by which a group of electors from each state would vote for president and vice president. These electors ultimately became known as the Electoral College.

Each state would have a slate of electors equal to the number of their senators and representatives in Congress.

For example, in 2004, Washington state had 11 electors: two senators plus nine representatives. Although a number of delegates to the Constitutional Convention preferred a direct, national popular vote, the committee’s recommendation won the day, largely on the argument that their method was a kind of hybrid, giving some electoral power to the states (senators) and some to citizens in general (representatives).

Today, all the states except Maine and Nebraska choose their electors with a winner-take-all system: Whichever candidate wins the most votes for that state gets all of the state’s electors.

Let’s say that in Washington, Smith gets 51 percent of the vote and Jones get 49 percent. Smith, as a result, would get all 11 of Washington’s electors. Because of winner-take-all and other aspects of Electoral College math, there have been three times in which the United States was governed by a president who was not the choice of the citizenry, in 1876, 1888 and 2000.

Another argument against the Electoral College is the impact it has on the way a presidential candidate, out of necessity, campaigns: He or she is compelled to focus almost entirely on “swing” states, with other states left behind.

These “left out” states include six of the nation’s 10 largest states (California, Texas, New York, Illinois, New Jersey and North Carolina), 12 of the 13 least populous states and most of the medium-sized states. Voters in these “left out” states may feel their votes don’t matter, resulting in poor voter turnout.

For these and other reasons, there have been many attempts to abolish the Electoral College, which would require an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Attempts to do so have failed over the years, despite the fact that for more than 50 years, polls have shown that the public overwhelmingly supports nationwide popular election of the president.

In 2006, the nonprofit, multi-partisan group National Popular Vote, Inc., devised a clever method to leave the Electoral College in place and yet have the candidate elected as president be the one who received the most citizen, not Electoral College, votes.

To see how this would work, let’s first look at some of the powers of the states.

Under the Constitution, state legislatures have the complete and exclusive power to choose the process of awarding their state’s electoral votes.

From Article II, Section 1, Clause 2, of the Constitution: “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors….”

The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly characterized the authority of the states over the manner of awarding their electoral votes as “supreme” and “plenary” and “exclusive.”

An example of this state power was made clear during the 2000 election, when the Republican-controlled Florida state legislature was prepared to put forward an alternate slate of electors, Republican electors, if all the ballots had been counted and Gore declared the winner.

With the power to choose the process of awarding their electoral votes, states have the ability to use another part of Constitutional law, namely “interstate compacts,” to achieve the goal of a National Popular Vote. Examples of existing interstate compacts include the Colorado River Compact, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the Powerball Lottery.

Interstate compacts are enacted by states in the same way they enact ordinary legislation. It is settled constitutional law that an interstate compact is a legally enforceable contractual obligation among the states belonging to the compact and all of their officials.

Given the constitutional power that states have to both decide how to award their state’s electoral votes and enter into interstate compacts, how could these powers be used to achieve the nationwide popular election of the president? This could happen if enough states joined together to pass identical state laws awarding all of their electoral votes to the presidential candidate receiving the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The proposed state legislation would come into effect only when it has been enacted, in identical form, by enough states to elect a president — namely, by states possessing a majority (270) of the 538 electoral votes.

The National Popular Vote bill has been enacted by Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey and Maryland. These four states possess 50 electoral votes — 19 percent of the 270 necessary to bring the law into effect.

The bill has also passed 21 state legislative chambers, including one chamber in Arkansas, Colorado, Maine, North Carolina and Washington, and both chambers in California, Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont.

The bill is currently endorsed by 1,181 state lawmakers — 439 sponsors in 47 states and an additional 742 legislators who have cast recorded votes in favor of the bill.

In the 2008 session of the Washington state legislature, the National Popular Vote bill passed in the senate but died in committee in the house. Our own state senator, Sen. Joe McDermott, is a champion of the NPV; he sponsored the bill in the House when he was a representative.

When the legislature resumes in January, I urge you to contact McDermott’s office about how you can help to see Washington pass the National Popular Vote bill.

As a result of the efforts by a growing movement of electoral reform activists, we’re closer than ever to ensuring that the person who sits in the White House is always the man or woman who was selected by the voters.

— Roger Fulton heads Vashon’s Democratic Club.