National Popular Vote junkets surface in televised debate

Junkets to exotic locations promoting the National Popular Vote (NPV) Interstate Compact to state legislators continue to make news, seven years after they first came to public notice in the wake of the Oklahoma Senate's surprising February 2014 vote to approve NPV, a plan that would have committed Oklahoma's presidential electors to the candidate receiving the most popular votes nationwide.

Sean Parnell of Save Our States, an organization designed to preserve the role of the states in electing the president through the Electoral College, recently wrote about a November 2020 debate about National Popular Vote on Nashville's NewsChannel 5 between Trent England of Save Our States and NPV lobbyist Ray Haynes. Haynes came to our notice in late 2014 when he lobbied grassroots activists, seeking to blunt their opposition for a second attempt at passage in 2015.

Faithful BatesLine readers will no doubt recall that Oklahoma's 2014 bill, SB 906, failed to advance in the House, and several senators who voted for it recanted their vote within days of casting it. NPV has been reintroduced in the Oklahoma Legislature since that time (Republican Rep. Lee Denney sponsored it in 2015, Democrat Rep. Jason Rosecrants in 2021), but it has failed to advance. The surprise passage in 2014 was greased in part by under-the-radar junkets that combined luxury and emotional manipulation -- the political equivalent of timeshare presentations. These junkets were documented at the time by Rep. Jason Murphey and a news story by Sean Murphy of the Associated Press.

During the NewsChannel 5 NPV debate, Haynes pointed to passage of NPV by the Oklahoma Senate in 2014 and the Arizona House in 2016 as evidence of Republican support for the anti-Electoral College measure. In reply, England recounted the tactics that were used to get NPV to pass in Oklahoma:

[In Oklahoma] the National Popular Vote lobbyists took a bunch of our state legislators, all Republicans, on a trip to a very expensive resort, and nobody knew this was going on, none of their constituents knew this was going on... and when these guys came back from this very expensive resort after only hearing one side of the story they introduced the legislation, they passed it, and when constituents found out about it, the capitol was flooded with angry calls and letters, the House refused to do anything with it, and they haven't been able to find a bill sponsor since then.

In the last five or six years, they can't find anybody in Oklahoma willing to sponsor their legislation. It's true it once passed in the Oklahoma State Senate, it once passed in the Arizona House, same thing in Arizona. ...[I]t passed when they had heard only one side of the story...

Haynes denied everything, but Parnell links to two BatesLine reports from 2014 to rebut Haynes's denial. Oklahoma legislators invited to electoral vote "seminars" in exotic locales and Legislators admit National Popular Vote junkets to Las Vegas, Miami.

While it's true that the organization NPV did not pay for the junkets, non-profits that advocate NPV, FairVote and the Institute for Research on Presidential Elections (IRPE), did, and NPV lobbyists informed and encouraged legislators to go on these trips. Parnell reports that Haynes is listed on IRS forms as IRPE's president.

Parnell cites a news story from 2018 about Republican Michigan legislators going on NPV-related junkets to Hawaii and Puerto Rico, prior to a surprising number of them co-sponsoring legislation. The story was originally broken by Brandon Hall at West Michigan Politics.

In 2019, Jamison Faught at Muskogee Politico found that Oklahoma legislators continued to attend junkets for NPV, paid for by IPRE, in 2017 and 2018.

This is likely to continue until NPV founder John Koza's money runs out. They can't reach the goal (enough states to total 270 electoral votes) without winning the support of Republican legislators, who have majorities in at least one house of many presidential swing states. Grassroots conservatives need to let their Republican legislators know that they will punish support for NPV at the ballot box.

MORE: Here's all of BatesLine's coverage of National Popular Vote, Muskogee Politico's coverage of NPV, and the Save Our States blog.