Amar Plan

The Amar Plan is a plan to reform the presidential election process in the United States to ensure that the President is chosen by national popular vote. The plan was put forward in 2001 by law professors (and brothers) Akhil Reed Amar and Vikram Amar. [ [http://writ.news.findlaw.com/amar/20011228.html Amar: How To Achieve Direct National Election Of The President Without Amending The Constitution] ]

While previous reform attempts focused on passing a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College, the Amar Plan tries a more novel approach. It proposes that a group of states, through legislation, form a compact wherein they agree to give all of their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, regardless of the balance of votes in their own state. These state laws would only be triggered once the compact included enough states to control a majority of the electoral college (270 votes), thus guaranteeing that the national popular vote winner would also win the electoral college. In this way, the Amar Plan rests atop the existing system, and even takes advantage of the states' current constitutional right to pick electors by a method of their own choosing. The Amar Plan could be enacted by the passage of laws in as few as 11 states (as allocated after the 2000 census), and without the attention of the U.S. Congress, much less the support of a supermajority (which constitutional amendments require).

It has been enacted in Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois, and Hawaii, which have 50 electoral votes between them. It was vetoed by the Governor of Rhode Island, after passing the legislature.

The Amar Plan has been adopted by the non-profit group National Popular Vote Inc., which in 2006 embarked on a nationwide campaign backed by a bipartisan group of respected former lawmakers, including John B. Anderson, Birch Bayh, and Jake Garn. [ [http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/pages/about.php National Popular Vote, Inc.] "About" page.] It is being introduced in several states as the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact; however, such a plan may trigger the mechanism set forth in the Compact Clause of Article One of the United States Constitution (Art. I, Sect. 10, Cl. 3) stating that "no state shall, without the Consent of Congress...enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State." Such a mechanism is in place in order to prevent agreements or compacts that would attempt to unduly circumvent the Constitution or provide for regional agreements to supersede national law. [ Amar, A.R. (2005). "America's constitution: A biography". New York: Random House. ]

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