Have you noticed how presidential candidates don’t really campaign much around Texas? Or California? Or New York? Yet they spend much of their time, attention, and money on Florida and Missouri and Ohio? The reason is simple: cost-benefit. Some states lean heavily toward one party or the other for Presidential races. Others are battleground states that could go either way. Candidates don’t need to waste much time campaigning in states where the outcome is already set. By extension, they don’t need to worry much about the concerns of those states, either. One pundit predicts that in next year’s Presidential election, only 7-14 states will actually matter.

Maybe this sounds good to you, but it sounds terrible to me. It means that if you live in a state that reliably votes for one party or the other for President, like Texas does, your vote doesn’t count. Something about it just doesn’t sound like a representative government. I believe the President should represent all Americans, not just those who live in battleground states. I think the election process should be very simple: whoever gets the most votes wins, just like in every election for every other office in the country. But as you probably know, it doesn’t work that way thanks to the Electoral College.

But that could be changing soon.

The National Popular Vote movement aims to work around the current, flawed Electoral College. It’s remarkably simple and doesn’t require a Constitutional amendment or any other action by our perpetually deadlocked Congress. It involves a compact among participating states, known as HB-1498 in Texas, that automatically awards the state’s electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the nationwide popular vote. Nice and easy, eh?

To make the change, states that hold at least 270 electoral votes must sign on the compact. Currently, they are about halfway there. Texas is not participating yet, but I used the link on the National Popular Vote website to urge my state representatives to support the bill. I hope you will do the same. Perhaps by next November, we can get this thing changed and make every vote count.