Tuesday, December 3, 2013

The Latest Election-Rigging Attempt by the GOP



Last winter, shortly after President Obama won his second term in office, many Republicans rallied behind a pair of election-rigging plans designed to make it virtually impossible for a Democrat to win White House again. Though the two plans differ in important ways, the crux of both plans is to rig the Electoral College by requiring blue states to award a significant portion of their electoral votes to Republican presidential candidates — all while ensuring that red states will award 100 percent of their electoral votes to the Republican as well. Though these election-rigging plans appeared dead after a wave of Republican officials came out against them, one of them has just returned to life in California.

On November 22, a man named Hal Nickle filed a proposed ballot initiative in California which would change the way that state allocates electoral votes to ensure that a large chunk of California’s 55 electors go to the GOP, even though Californians consistently prefer Democratic candidates to Republicans. Rather than allocating all of California’s electoral votes to the winner of the state as a whole, as nearly all states currently award their votes, the election-rigging initiative would allocate the states votes proportionally according to the percentage of votes won by each candidate. Thus, if this plan had been in effect in 2012, Mitt Romney would have received 37.12 percent of California’s electors — adding 20 to his overall total.

The trick behind this proposal is that if would only change the law in California, while leaving red states free to award all of their electors to the Republican...

Counter: perhaps Democrats should try this in Texas, Louisiana, and other reliably red states. it would be interesting to see the GOP try to wiggle their way around saying it is okay to do this in blue states but not red states (because you know they would try to rationalize that "logic").

1 comment:

  1. On August 8, 2011 California Governor Jerry Brown signed the National Popular Vote bill.

    The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC).

    Every vote, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in presidential elections. No more distorting and divisive red and blue state maps. There would no longer be a handful of 'battleground' states where voters and policies are more important than those of the voters in 80% of the states that now are just 'spectators' and ignored after the conventions.

    When the bill is enacted by states with a majority of the electoral votes– enough electoral votes to elect a President (270 of 538), all the electoral votes from the enacting states would be awarded to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC.

    In a 2008 survey of Californians, 70% of residents and likely voters supported a national popular vote, while 21% of residents and 22% of likely voters preferred that the current state winner-take-all Electoral College system continue. Democrats (76%) and independents (74%) were more likely to support a change to popular vote than Republicans, but 61% of Republicans supported this change.

    The bill has passed 32 state legislative chambers in 21 rural, small, medium, and large states with 243 electoral votes, and been enacted by 10 jurisdictions with 136 electoral votes – 50.4% of the 270 necessary to go into effect.

    NationalPopularVote
    on Facebook via NationalPopular VoteInc

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