GOP electoral vote-rigging schemes still alive and well

[babylonsister]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/02/25/gop-electoral-vote-rigging-scheme-still-alive-and-well/

GOP electoral vote-rigging schemes still alive and well

Posted by Jamelle Bouie on February 25, 2013 at 1:20 pm


Over the weekend, thirteen GOP Pennsylvania Senators, led by Majority Leader Domini Pileggi, introduced a new plan to redistribute electoral votes by congressional district. Under this legislation, the winner of the state’s congressional districts would receive the most electoral votes, even if she lost the popular vote. In other words, it would reward candidates for winning land, not people.

If Pennsylvania distributed its electoral votes this way in 2012, Mitt Romney would have won eight of twenty votes, on account of his strength in rural areas of the state. Indeed, if every swing state allocated its votes in this way, Romney would have won the election, which explains the sudden popularity of proposals like this in various states. In some of them, such as Virginia — which recently introduced a plan to award one electoral vote for every Congressional district — it has been abandoned.

But the idea is not dead yet. There’s the aforementioned plan in Pennsylvania. And there’s also Michigan. According to the Detroit Free Press, an overwhelming majority of Republicans voted in favor of a similar plan during the Michigan state GOP conference, despite opposition from Governor Rick Snyder:

By a 1,370-132 margin at the party convention in Lansing, GOP members approved a resolution backing a proposal from Rep. Pete Lund, R-Shelby Township, to divvy-up 14 of the state’s 16 electoral votes according to which candidate got the most votes in each congressional district. The other two would go to the state-wide vote total winner.

That switch from a winner-take-all formula that has been in effect 175 years could water down the dominance Democrats have had in Michigan in presidential elections for the last 24 years.

snip//

In other words, for the Republican base, it seems, 2012 was just a temporary setback. At this point base voters don’t seem to want the party to change its policies or do anything meaningful to reach out to minorities. But there are still the realities of demographic change, which favors the Democratic Party, and the unpopularity of GOP ideas with growing segments of the electorate. And so the only path left is to change the rules of the game.

[Gorp]

1. The new trick is to bypass the courts that struck down voter ID by switching precincts.

I'm not kidding. Our voting place (for at least ten years) is within walking distance. We just got new voter registration cards that switched our polling place to a different location. Under state law, that's the only time you have to show ID to vote - the first time at a new polling location. All they have to do is move the polling place assignments around before every election and they've got their voter ID law without actually having the law.

Our problem isn't voter fraud, it's low voter turnout.