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Louisiana’s votes in the presidential election don’t really matter and, as a result, federal leaders pay little attention to the state, a former congressman from Colorado said Friday. Tom Tancredo, of Littleton, Colo., was in Baton Rouge pushing House Bill 1095 before the state Legislature that would join Louisiana to a national movement to elect the president of the United States by popular vote instead of through the Electoral College. “Why should a Louisiana Democrat even bother cast a vote for president?” asked Tancredo, who is lobbying for the National Popular Vote Bill. The majority of Louisiana voters likely will back whomever the Republican Party nominates, said Tancredo, echoing what pollsters, political observers and officials with both parties have said repeatedly. That means Louisiana’s eight electoral votes will go to the GOP candidate and the votes cast for the Democratic candidate will be ignored. Barack Obama received 782,989 votes or 40 percent of the 1.96 million cast in Louisiana for the November 2008 presidential election, according the Secretary of State’s office. But all of the state’s electors went to Republican John McCain, who received 1.15 million votes. Tancredo said almost all of the presidential candidates focus their visits – and advertising dollars – on the 15 or so “swing” states whose majorities are in doubt. After the election, the attention and policies of federal officials necessarily focus on those states, he said. For instance, Tancredo said federal response to the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion in April 2010 provides a good example. It wasn’t until the leaked oil started threatening the coast of Florida, a state whose electors are up for grabs every four years, that the federal government really became engaged, he said. That would change if the votes for the losing candidates in winner-take-all states like Louisiana went towards a national tally that would select the president, Tancredo said. Under the U.S. Constitution, a president is chosen by a majority of electoral votes, currently it’s 270 out of the 538 available. The idea presented by the founding fathers — before the advent of political parties — was for the electors to mull over possible candidates, Tancredo said. Louisiana is among the 48 states, and Washington, D.C., that awards all its electors as a single bloc to the candidate who wins the balloting in the state. HB1095 provides the legal procedures for awarding electors to candidates proportional to the popular vote totals and for joining a compact of other states willing to use the same procedures. The legislation would not eliminate the Electoral College. Tancredo said enough states are needed to join the compact so that the members, together, would have enough electoral votes to decide the election. Nine states have passed legislation to join the compact. This is not the first time Louisiana legislators have looked at this proposal. In 2011, the House and Governmental Affairs committee advanced the bill over the objections of Gov. Bobby Jindal’s office. But the legislation languished on the House calendar and was never voted upon by the full chamber. The National Popular Vote effort is distributing a brochure aimed at Republican legislators that says awarding electors by popular vote, rather than the current winner-take-all system, would help Republican presidential candidates because more GOP voters live in the states that go Democratic in national elections than vice versa.