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In the wake of Republican candidates for president winning the Electoral College and the popular vote, has Hawaii’s Legislature hoisted itself on its own petard?

By way of background, under our Constitution, the president of the United States is selected not by the popular vote, but by the Electoral College. Every state is allocated two votes for their Senators plus one vote for each Congressional seat.

The idea was to distribute power among all the states to ensure proportional representation. If, for example, the president was elected by popular vote, the election would be decided by the larger states and, indeed, by the nation’s largest cities – e.g., New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Phoenix, Philadelphia. Candidates for president would only need to campaign in those cities and ignore the smaller states such as Wyoming Vermont, Alaska and Hawaii.

The Electoral College system gives Hawaii and the other smaller states (by population) a larger proportionate power in selecting the president of the United States.

So, why would any smaller state such as Hawaii want to abdicate its power to larger states by casting its electoral votes only to the candidate who won the popular vote?

In their first elections for president, George W. Bush and Donald Trump won the Electoral College vote but lost the popular vote. Since largely Democrat-controlled states believe Democrats tend to win the popular vote, they therefore see value in allocating their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote. Makes sense, right?

Well, that’s plain wrong. Like Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush’s second election, Donald Trump just won both the Electoral College and the popular vote, the latter by several million votes. If Hawaii’s votes went to the candidate who won the popular vote, its electoral votes would have been cast for Donald Trump even though Hawaii overwhelmingly voted for Kamala Harris.

So, wouldn’t Hawaii be better off with the Electoral College system and not allocating votes to the winner of the popular vote? You would think so. Yet, in 2007 Hawaii’s Democrat-controlled Legislature made Hawaii join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact to award its votes to the candidate winning the popular vote.

If that compact were in effect today, which it will not be until it represents a majority of national votes, Hawaii’s electoral votes would have gone to Donald Trump because he won the popular vote. Trump would therefore have won by an even higher number of electoral votes than he got. This is the very result the Honolulu Star-Bulletin warned about in an opinion on April 29, 2007.

I had a conversation a few years ago with then-Gov. Linda Lingle on this very issue. Her veto of the measure was overturned by the Legislature. We were both mystified why Hawaii’s Legislature wanted to dilute its constitutional power as a smaller state by joining the compact. But it has.

In conclusion, the compact would have given Donald Trump all of Hawaii’s electoral votes and Hawaii’s Democrat Party would have hoisted itself on its own petard.