Justin's Political Corner
After watching the Republican presidential candidates lose the last two elections, right-wing activist Ken Blackwell cooked up a scheme whereby states would move away from winner-take-all allocations of electors to a system in which Electoral College votes would be assigned according to congressional districts.
The result would be that a Republican presidential candidate who does not win the overall popular vote in the state could still end up receiving a majority of that state’s electoral votes simply by virtue of winning the popular vote in more individual districts.
Today, Blackwell appeared on “WallBuilders Live” to promote this scheme, where it was met with enthusiastic support from Rick Green and David Barton. As Blackwell explained, if every state had implemented this plan for the 2012 election, Mitt Romney would have won despite the fact that he lost the overall popular vote by nearly 5 million votes.
Blackwell: There’s an old farmer’s tale that if you throw a brick at a pack of pigs, the one that squeals is the one you hit. Well, when we put this out there, the Left started squealing, the New York Times started squealing, so we must be on to something.
Green: You must be on to something. No doubt about that. I haven’t had a chance to look, I don’t if anyone has done a map, I’d be real curious to know if every state did this, how would the last few elections [have gone]? Have you had a chance to look?
Blackwell: I already know. If every state did it, Romney would have won the election. And so that’s another reason that the Left just instinctively dislikes it.
…
Barton: This actually is a way to give the people a greater voice rather than just having the majority slap it to the minority every time you turn around. And I really like what he’s proposed here with reverting back out of the winner-take-all philosophy of the states, going back to congressional district take all, which is a good way to do it.
From the 05.02.2013 edition of Wallbuilders Live:
Late last week, democracy scored two important victories over a Republican plan to rig future presidential elections by changing the way electoral votes are counted in several key blue states. Two Virginia Republican state senators spoke out against the plan, effectively killing it. And Florida House Speaker Will Weatherford (R) attacked the election-rigging scheme as trying to “change the rules of the game.”
In Michigan, however, which is the bluest of the six blue states where the election-rigging plan has been discussed, state House Speaker Jase Bolger (R) appears quite open to rigging his state’s electoral college votes to benefit Republicans.
In other words, Republican voters in Michigan are upset that Democrats win elections simply because there are more of them. And Bolger wants to fix that by giving the few Republicans more votes than the majority.
WASHINGTON — Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) did not rule out allocating the state’s electoral votes proportionally Saturday.
“It’s an interesting idea,” he told a Newsmax interviewer at the National Review Institute Summit in Washington after speaking at a lunch. “I haven’t committed one way or the other to it. For me, and I think any other state considering this, you should really look at not just the short-term but the long-term implications. Is it better or worse for the electorate?
Said Walker, “Some might argue that it would give more opportunity for candidates to jump in; others suggest it might reduce it.”
“I think we have to very careful in changes like that. But I think it’s worth looking at,” he said.
h/t: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/26/scott-walker-electoral-vote_n_2558362.html
Hmmm
Vogel, a former Republican National Committee election lawyer, said she saw no problem with the bill’s legality, but objected to the image it creates for her party so soon after Obama’s victory last fall.
“It’s the timing of it,” she said. “It’s just an awful impression it makes.”
Riiiiiight. By “awful,” of course, she means “an accurate assessment of what our party is all about.”
(via pop-rocks-blowjob)
(via How Republicans Plan To Rig The Next Presidential Election, In Six Pictures | ThinkProgress)
Yesterday, Virginia Republicans took the first step to move a GOP plan to rig the Electoral College forward in that state. Similar plans are under consideration in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
The Republican election rigging plan targets blue states that President Obama won in 2008 and 2012, and changes the way they allocate electoral votes to give many of these votes away for free to the Republican candidate for president. Under the Republican Plan, most electoral votes will be allocated to the winner of individual Congressional districts, rather than to the winner of the state as a whole. Because the Republican Plan would be implemented in states that are heavily gerrymandered to favor Republicans, the resulting maps would all but guarantee that the Republican would win a majority of each state’s electoral votes, even if the Democratic candidate wins the state as a whole.
Fresh from claiming the GOP’s 2012 run was “a great campaign—a nine-month campaign”; that only went awry at the end, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus now wants to rig the Electoral College so that when Republicans lose they still might “win.”
Specifically, Priebus is urging Republican governors and legislators to take up what was once a fringe scheme to change the rule for distribution of Electoral College votes. Under the Priebus plan, electoral votes from battleground states such as Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin and other states that now regularly back Democrats for president would be allocated not to the statewide winner but to the winners of individual congressional districts.
Because of gerrymandering by Republican governors and legislators, and the concentration of Democratic votes in urban areas and college towns, divvying up Electoral College votes based on congressional district wins would yield significantly better results for the GOP. In Wisconsin, where Democrat Barack Obama won in 2012 by a wider margin than he did nationally, the president would only have gotten half the electoral votes. In Pennsylvania, where Obama won easily, he would not have gotten the twenty electoral votes that he did; instead, under the Priebus plan, it would have been eight for Republican Mitt Romney, twelve for Barack Obama.
Nationwide, Obama won a sweeping popular-vote victory—with an almost 5-million ballot margin that made him the first president since Dwight Eisenhower to take more than 51 percent of the vote in two elections. That translated to a very comfortable 322-206 win in the Electoral College.
How would the 2012 results have changed if a Priebus plan had been in place? According to an analysis byFair Vote-The Center for Voting and Democracy, the results would have been a dramatically closer and might even have yielded a Romney win.
Under the most commonly proposed district plan (the statewide winner gets two votes with the rest divided by congressional district) Obama would have secured the narrowest possible win: 270-268. Under more aggressive plans (including one that awards electoral votes by district and then gives the two statewide votes to the candidate who won the most districts), Romney would have won 280-258.
“If Republicans in 2011 had abused their monopoly control of state government in several key swing states and passed new laws for allocating electoral votes, the exact same votes cast in the exact same way in the 2012 election would have converted Barack Obama’s advantage of nearly five million popular votes and 126 electoral votes into a resounding Electoral College defeat,” explains FairVote’s Rob Richie.
The RNC chair is encouraging Republican governors and legislators—who, thanks to the “Republican wave” election of 2010, still control many battleground states that backed Obama and the Democrats in 2012—to game the system.
“I think it’s something that a lot of states that have been consistently blue [Democratic in presidential politics] that are fully controlled red [in the statehouse] ought to be considering,” Priebus says with regard to the schemes for distributing electoral votes by district rather than the traditional awarding of the votes of each state (except Nebraska and Maine, which have historically used narrowly defined district plans) to the winner.
Already, there are moves afoot in a number of battleground states to “fix” the rules to favor the Republicans in 2016, just as they have already fixed the district lines for electing members of the House. Thanks to gerrymandering and the concentration of Democratic votes, Republicans were able to lose the overall nationwide vote for US House seats by 1.4 million votes and still take control of the chamber—thus giving the United States the divided government that voters have rejected.
