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Country Moves Closer To National Popular Vote System After Colorado Voters Narrowly Approve Prop 113

KUNC File Photo

Colorado voters have narrowly endorsed a movement to change the way the United States picks its presidents.

With the passage of Proposition 113, Colorado will stay in the so-called National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

The initiative consists of a group of states wanting to award all their electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the most votes nationwide.

Supporters of the movement say it will ensure that every vote for the president counts. They also predict moving to a national popular vote will take attention away from a small group of battleground states during presidential elections.

But even with Prop 113 passing with 52% of the vote in Colorado, there’s still no guarantee the change to a popular vote model will ever take place.

That’s because there currently aren’t enough states in the compact to trigger the change with 270 electoral votes.

With Colorado’s membership secured, the group is still 74 electoral votes shy of reaching their goal.

Colorado lawmakers made the decision to join the national popular vote movement last year, but the new law stirred up so much controversy, more than 600,000 residents signed a petition to get the question on November’s ballot.

It was just the second time in the state's history that residents initiated a referendum challenging a law passed by the legislature.

Opponents say the national popular vote system would hurt rural residents and give more power to major cities in California and New York.

Copyright 2020 KUNC

Scott Franz is a government watchdog reporter and photographer from Steamboat Springs. He spent the last seven years covering politics and government for the Steamboat Pilot & Today, a daily newspaper in northwest Colorado. His reporting in Steamboat stopped a police station from being built in a city park, saved a historic barn from being destroyed and helped a small town pastor quickly find a kidney donor. His favorite workday in Steamboat was Tuesday, when he could spend many of his mornings skiing untracked powder and his evenings covering city council meetings. Scott received his journalism degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is an outdoorsman who spends at least 20 nights a year in a tent. He spoke his first word, 'outside', as a toddler in Edmonds, Washington. Scott visits the Great Sand Dunes, his favorite Colorado backpacking destination, twice a year. Scott's reporting is part of Capitol Coverage, a collaborative public policy reporting project, providing news and analysis to communities across Colorado for more than a decade. Fifteen public radio stations participate in Capitol Coverage from throughout Colorado.