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Electoral College Reform Supporters Start Ballot Effort In Ohio
By: Jo Ingles | Statehouse News Bureau
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A group has filed paperwork to allow voters to join a national effort to get rid of electoral votes and award the presidency to the candidate who actually gets the most votes.
Attorney General Dave Yost has certified the ballot language summary. Now it’s up to the Ballot Board to give the okay for a national group to begin to collect petition signatures to put an issue before voters that would declare the person who gets the most votes the winner.
Rep. David Leland (D-Columbus) says he’s not the one who filed the paperwork to authorize Ohio’s membership in the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. But he’s long been behind the idea of scrapping the electoral vote which was originally designed to prevent the tyranny of the majority.
“Right now, what we have is the tyranny of the minority. We have a situation where a minority of people in the United States are actually controlling what happens in our presidential elections,” Leland says.
Ohio has 18 electoral votes and all of those go to the winner of the popular vote in the state. But if enough states sign onto this national compact, it would become the law of the nation. So far, 13 states have signed onto it.
There have been several elections in recent years, including the one that swept President Donald Trump into office, where the winner of the popular vote was not the person who took over the nation’s top office.