In September, top Pennsylvania Republicans shocked the nation by proposing a change to the state's election rules that would have rigged the Electoral College in favor of Mitt Romney. Facing a nationwide backlash, the state's GOP backed down—but not beforeWisconsin Republicans considered a similar plan. With the old rules still in place, President Barack Obama won a 332-206 electoral college victory over Romney.
But now that Romney has been defeated, prominent GOPers are once again mulling rule changes that could make it harder for Democrats to win the White House—and easier for Republicans to claim Electoral College votes in states where they lose the popular vote.
Remember, the presidential election isn't a nationwide contest, it's a state-by-state fight, with each state worth a certain number of electoral votes (the District of Columbia gets 3, too). There are 538 electoral votes total; if you win 270 or more, you're headed to the White House—even, as George W. Bush can assure you, if you don't win the popular vote. The Constitution allows each state to allocate electoral votes however it wants, but in every state except for Nebraska and Maine, the contest is winner-take-all. If you get the most votes in Pennsylvania, you get all of its electoral votes.
Republicans want to change that. On December 3, Dominic Pileggi, the powerful Republican majority leader of the Pennsylvania state Senate, announced that he plans to introduce legislation that would change how the state allocates its electoral votes. This shouldn't be a surprise: Pileggi was one of the Pennsylvania politicians behind the pre-election plan to change Electoral College rules.
Before the election, Pileggi's plan (backed by a mysterious dark-money group called All Votes Matter) was to allocate electoral votes by congressional district, with the winner of each district receiving one electoral vote and the statewide winner getting a two-electoral-vote bonus. That might not seem like a big deal. But Pennsylvania, like other blue states in the upper Midwest, was subjected to a very effective Republican gerrymander after the 2010 midterm elections. Republicans won 13 of its 18 districts in 2012, so if Pileggi's pre-election plan had been in effect, Obama could have been awarded as few as 7 of Pennsylvania's 20 electoral votes, despite winning the state.
Pileggi's post-election scheme has a new twist. Instead of awarding electoral votes by congressional district, it would award them in relation to the statewide popular vote, with a two-electoral-vote bonus for the winner. That would prevent blatantly undemocratic effects like a candidate losing a state's popular vote but still winning its electoral votes. But it would still have a similar effect to Pileggi's earlier idea—it would ensure that at least some of Pennsylvania's 20 electoral votes, which have gone to Democrats in every election since 1992, would go to Republicans. In a close election, that could change the outcome.
No comments:
Post a Comment