All ready except for one Senator: Salem's Peter Courtney, Senate President. He's fine with having Oregonian's wishes ignored and having a system that lets reactionary billionaires start out with a head-start towards installing their preferred candidate for the presidency every four years.
The Electoral College was always 100% about slavery and giving certain people -- white, rural people -- more power than anyone else in deciding who should be president.
The entire reason the Electoral College was created was to protect the slave states from an abolitionist president, while allowing them to disenfranchise most of their residents; further, they got to count enslaved people as 3/5ths of a person in the census, which determines the seats for the state in the House of Representatives in Congress.
You can no more separate the Electoral College from its roots in preserving the disproportionate power of white rural votes than you can separate the purr from a cat.
The whole point of using this bizarre anachronism is, as it was before the Civil War, to disadvantage the people more urban regions (the norther, free states) while unfairly advantaging voters in rural states (the South). It's the most un-American idea in the Constitution, in that it is entirely about making "one person, one vote" into pure fiction, as the Electoral Collect means that the weight of your vote for president -- the only national elected office -- depends entirely on whether you are in a more or less populous state. If you are a rural voter in an empty state, your vote counts many times more than it would if you were in a high population state.
The Electoral College is now not just stupid, it's a pathological and dangerous threat to the American Republic in the age of nuclear weapons. That's because its terrible defect -- the consequence of electing a popular vote loser -- is now dormant no more; twice since 2000, the popular vote winner was not elected and the electoral vote loser was.
Worse, the arguments in favor of the Electoral College have now been clearly shown to be absurd.
The Electoral College doesn't protect against the unqualified populist, it is what allowed the unqualified populist to use over-weighted rural votes to win the office despite having millions more Americans opposed to his election than in favor of it.
The scholarly rationalization ("the substitution of a good reason for the real reason") was always that the Founding Fathers feared a demagogue and a candidate for president who would whip up popular sentiment against the rich and powerful and convince the people to give him power, which he would then use to benefit himself and his friends instead of governing in the national interest. This is precisely what has happened now, in this most dangerous time.
The only reason Oregon hasn't joined the NPV compact is the President of the Oregon Senate, Peter Courtney, Salem's state senator. Come to Louck's Auditorium next Sunday at 3:30 and hear more about NPV and what you can do to help get Oregon into the right column of YES states.
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