The Wrongologist

What’s
Wrong Today:

There is
much comment in the media and blogosphere about the Republican plan to change
how votes in the Electoral College are apportioned to presidential candidates,
from winner take all, to being largely apportioned to the winner of each
congressional district. Republicans in Virginia and other battleground states
are pushing for this change, in order to prevent future Democratic national electoral success like President Obama’s winning of a 2nd term.

How
does the system work today?

In
most states, (Maine and Nebraska excepted) the presidential candidate who wins the
popular vote in their state receives all of that state’s electoral votes. A
state’s number of electors equals its number of US Representatives and Senators.

Although
ballots list the names of the presidential candidates, voters within the 50
states and Washington, DC actually
choose electors for their state when they vote for President and Vice
President. These presidential electors in turn cast electoral votes for those
two offices, so the national popular vote is not the basis for electing a
President or Vice President.

Despite
what you might think, the Constitution reserves this power to the states. Here
is Article 2,
Section 1; Clause 2:

“Each
state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a
number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives
to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or
Representative, or person holding an office of trust or profit under the United
States, shall be appointed an elector.”

So it is clear that each state has the exclusive right to
determine how their state electors are selected.

What is the proposed Republican “Fix”?         

The proposed Republican “Fix” would apportion electoral votes to the presidential candidate
that wins each congressional district, plus 2 electors that would go to
whomever won the statewide total. Since
each congressional district is worth one elector, under this approach
in Virginia in 2012, President Obama would have claimed 4 of the state’s 13
electoral votes, despite winning the state by 150,000 votes.

Other
states considering moving from a winner-take-all system to allocating electoral
votes to the candidate winning in each congressional district include Michigan,
Ohio and Pennsylvania, all of which, like Virginia, went for Obama in the past
two elections, but are controlled by Republicans at the state level.

This change
would heavily favor Republican presidential candidates in these states, tilting
the voting power away from cities and toward rural areas, making it more likely
that a candidate with fewer votes over all could win a larger share of
electoral votes. Thanks in part to recent gerrymandering, 27 States have Republican-controlled
legislatures.

Peter
Lund, a Republican state representative in Michigan, plans to reintroduce legislation
that would award all but two of Michigan’s 16 Electoral College votes according
to congressional district results, while the remaining two would go to the
candidate winning the statewide majority, says an article in The Detroit
News.

Mr. Obama
beat Mr. Romney in Michigan by a margin of nearly 450,000 votes. With an
allocation of electoral votes by congressional district as described in Peter
Lund’s proposal, the Detroit News reported that Romney would have gotten 9 of
Michigan’s electoral votes and Obama would have received 7 in 2012. Instead,
Obama garnered all 16 Michigan electoral votes.  

Is the
proposed “Fix” Fair?

Should we
be talking about this in 2013? Debating whether to pass bills to reduce urban
voters to a fraction of the value of other voters while hoping that someone else
will step forward to stop it?

An advantage of the Electoral
College is that it tends to inflate the mandate and give us a leader who has a
leg to stand on, at least at the beginning of his/her term of office. Also, it ensures
that candidates will actually campaign in more places rather than in fewer. Why
would anyone campaign in NH when they can garner five or ten times as many
popular votes in a couple of counties in California? Now they do because the
four electoral votes can make a difference.

Jonathan Bernstein had an important observation in the Washington
Monthly:
(emphasis by the Wrongologist)

The fact is that the Republicans
have the ability to make this happen, even though some Republican are downplaying the plan. California’s redistricting model, using
an independent commission may prove effective, since politics-based redistricting
is at the root of this evil.

Statehouses deciding elections can have severe consequences.

We need a strategy
to prevent this from happening, or to reverse it once it does happen. Removing
politicians from the redistricting process is crucial.

Spread
the word:

To:     Reince
Priebus – Chairman of the RNC

From:
The American Voter


Let’s recap the your party’s ideas to win more national elections:

• Promote
  the fiction of “widespread voter fraud” with new voter ID laws that
  adversely impact the poor and people of color.

• Shut
  down early voting hours in key states and districts where the early vote tends to
  favor Democrats.

• Move
  the goalposts in the Electoral College to a proportional allocation instead of
  winner take all system for electors – potentially distorting the majority will
  of the people.

Mr.
Priebus, here is another strategy to consider: How about taking reasonable
positions on major issues and creating balanced public policy proposals to gain
greater voter support?


How about being a party of better ideas and sounder leadership rather than a
party of subterfuge?

You
will attract more support that way.