SB 138 is designed to implement something described as a method of selecting the President of the US by popular vote via a weirdly designed mechanism to by-pass amending the Constitution.
The rationale for this is to be more “democratic”.  Humbug!
There were, and are sound reasons NOT to run our national system as a democracy. I noted comments earlier on this from Madville Times, as well as on SD Politics, but was distracted from commenting byvarious meteorological and mechanical events. It is NOT fun to work on machines without a heated environment when the weather is what the weather was, but I digress.
My own feeling is that this sort of thing is not particularly of benefit. The constitutional system was designed to be a non-democratic federal republic. The stake-holders were the states, as well as the people. The states had their place at the federal table by selecting the senators in the state legislators. (Personally, I think the 17th Amendment is well worth repealing, not that I expect to ever see it happen.)  The people had their input via the directly elected representatives. The electoral college was a scheme to prevent the more populous states from automatically running rough-shod over the smaller states in the selection of the president.
The most frequently heard complaint about the current electoral college is that it can allow a failure in the Divine Commandment of Vox Populi, Vox Deus, as occurred most recently in 1980, and in a few cases before. So what? We survived the experience in good order. The last time I checked last November the republic was still functional!
I have real trouble seeing how a popularization of the presidential vote can be of any benefit to small states. I note that Cory cites an example of enabling concentration of funds in the large cities as being a possible GOP advantage, but frankly I don’t see it. It doesn’t matter HOW much the GOP spends in L.A., Boston, New York, ‘Frisco, etc….they are probably not going to do very well, at least in the inner cities. (The last time I visited the old home town of St. Louis, 24 of 28 city aldermen were of the Donkey persuasion.) What would be more likely to happen with a popular vote scheme would be for the Donks to ignore the core cities, and rural areas, and pump THEIR funds into the suburbs to swing enough votes to make a difference. The GOP would of necessity be forced into the same pattern to avoid being totally swamped. In both cases, places like ND, SD, WY, MT, etc. would become virtually invisible in presidential elections if the prize automatically went to the pop-vote winner, which could be swung relatively easily by the larger urban areas. (Farm vote? We don’t need no steenkin’ farm vote!)
And the problem with that is…? What is the guarantee to prevent a “democratic” majority for selecting an individual or party with a dedication to running rough over a minority’s interests, up to and including their right to do things like worship, or even live, to cite a couple of commonly denied things. It behooves one who genuflects before the altar of democracy to recall that such luminaries of humanitarian civilization as Mussolini, Hitler, Ahmadinejad, or even Slobodan Milosevich were all elected! Also, the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip more recently selected the wanna-be genocidalists of Hamas as their favored rulers. But hey, that’s all OK if it’s “democratic”, right?
Wrong! That’s why the designers of our republic’s constitution wisely (IMHO) hobbled the free-exercise of democracy.
(By the way, with the news as it’s been lately, it might be worth recalling just why they denied the vote to the District of Columbia. It’s the same reason that D.C.’s street plot had all those circles with radiating streets: cannon strategically placed could easily sweep the streets of rioters! (Look up the effects of the Roman and Byzantine mobs on their imperial politics.)