Theres another expression that to be honest, I should use here as well. Keep your words soft and sweet just in case you have to eat them, See in my first blog ever I mentioned an idea Pennsylvania republicans had advanced to change the way their states votes counted in 2012 (that they later withdrew) that Ohio had picked up following the 2012 election. And I titled said blog "What do you do when a neighboring state has a bad idea? steal it....". Well it turns out, Republicans seem to have decided that the new way to vote was a good idea and more states planning on are using it.
See the way things currently work in most states (not Nebraska or Maine but the others) the winner of the popular vote, wins all the electoral votes of the state. And its the electoral votes that count for president, the candidate who gets more electoral votes wins the presidency.
Now admittedly the system isn't perfect. 4 times the winner of the popular vote has lost the electoral vote (1824, 1876, 1888 and 2000) and two of those required another branch of government to step in and pick the winner (1876 and 2000). Which opens the electoral college system up to the idea that its "not fair", which is totally true, its kinda not, if you vote for the candidate who loses the popular vote in your state, your vote basically doesnt matter. Which has lead to calls to reform or eliminate the electoral college to make it a fair election.
Now it is these calls the Republicans as seizing on for the impetus for their new system....the problem is the system in very state that's proposing it, would make things less fair.
I said before that in theory at least Nebraska and Maine use a different system, they award their votes based on the winner of the congressional districts, not the state as a whole, so its possible to "split" their vote in the electoral college, although its never actually happened, due in large part to both states being rather small states.
But thats basically the proposal the GOP now wants to advance in other states as well. The problem is of course that congressional districts arnt any more fair then anything else. We cap the number of congressional districts by law in the country at 435 no matter what the actual population is. The federal government then basically divides them up among the states by population, so the more populated states get a bigger share but its the state governments themselves that get to draw the lines, and the populations of the districts actually dont have to be anywhere near equal. There's a minimum population a district has to have, but their isnt a maximum.
Perhaps your familiar with the concept of Gerrymandering? basically its drawing a district line solely to make it more likely for your parties candidates to win and basically impossible for the other sides to win.
Now to be fair, both parties do it, but as it turned out the GOP had control of the majority of the state governments in 2010 the last time we drew the lines. Which is probably the reason they favor this plan at the moment.
See he's a map of the new states that are considering this plan, plus the aforementioned Ohio by congressional districts. The districts in red had a majority of their district vote republican in 2012, the ones in blue democrats.
Now if you just glance at the pictures the first thing you notice in every single state is that that is an awful lot of red. But looks at the bottom of each picture, Obama won the popular vote in all of those states, and in most of them (not FL or OH) by a pretty wide margin. Because again not all congressional districts are created equal.
But you notice the boxes under the states? thats the number of electoral votes each party would have won, although the winner of the state overall would received an additional 2 votes (representing the 2 senate electoral votes for winning the popular vote in the state)
Now lets take Michigan as the example here. What the GOP system would mean is that despite winning the state with almost a 10% margin (so roughly voter voted 60/40 for Obama) the democratic party would have only gotten 7 electoral votes (5 congressional districts + the 2 for winning the popular vote overall) and the Republicans who lost would get 9.
And thats true for every single one of those states, except Wisconsin, in which the electoral votes would be split 5/5, again despite a democratic win of nearly 7 points.
But heres the kicker, had this new system been in place in 2012 just in those 6 states, we would have sworn in president Mitt Romney monday, as he would have beaten Obama 271 to 268 in the electoral college. Keep in mind this wouldnt change the fact that he lost the popular vote to Obama nationwide by 4%
So we would have just sworn in the guy who basically the country didnt want. And heres the thing, that likely would become a regular event, since every time we did a Census the party in power in the most states would be able to draw all the district lines to ensure they would win the presidency, every single time.
Now sure sometime the party in power in a year that ends in 0 might be the popular party when we have a presidential election, and so their guy would win either way. But more often then not, thats probably not going to be true. (your already seeing this in the House, even though the GOP held the majority they got a ton less votes overall then the democrats, because of gerrymandering...and to be fair the opposite was true when the dems drew the lines, again its not a party thing, this is just a bad idea that at the moment the GOP is proposing for short term gain)
In other-words under this new republican plan (which by the way they are already drawing up legislation for in 4 of those states) we would actually make the electoral college even less fair.
Bonus by the way for the state of Virginia, on Monday one of the state senators, who happened to be a democrat, when to see the presidential inauguration. Now normally the VA senate is split right down the middle 20 Dem's 20 Republicans. Now with this senator gone the GOP had a 1 day advantage so held a unscheduled vote to scrap the states previously approved new district lines in favor of much much much more jury rigged ones (rigged of course to favor republicans) and got the new plan through 20-19 due to the single missing democrat (in the case of a tie the LT gov, who would cast the tie breaking vote had already said he was against the idea) as the first step in their plan to introduce the new way of counting votes.
Which I suppose is good if your in the minority of Virginia who lives in the 8 congressional districts the next republican will win (which actually will likely jump to 9 if the new plan is approved). Not so good if your in the majority of Virginia who live in the 3 (soon to be 2) districts who actually voted for the state wide winner.
But hey remember every vote counts......until they vote against you.....
But you notice the boxes under the states? thats the number of electoral votes each party would have won, although the winner of the state overall would received an additional 2 votes (representing the 2 senate electoral votes for winning the popular vote in the state)
Now lets take Michigan as the example here. What the GOP system would mean is that despite winning the state with almost a 10% margin (so roughly voter voted 60/40 for Obama) the democratic party would have only gotten 7 electoral votes (5 congressional districts + the 2 for winning the popular vote overall) and the Republicans who lost would get 9.
And thats true for every single one of those states, except Wisconsin, in which the electoral votes would be split 5/5, again despite a democratic win of nearly 7 points.
But heres the kicker, had this new system been in place in 2012 just in those 6 states, we would have sworn in president Mitt Romney monday, as he would have beaten Obama 271 to 268 in the electoral college. Keep in mind this wouldnt change the fact that he lost the popular vote to Obama nationwide by 4%
So we would have just sworn in the guy who basically the country didnt want. And heres the thing, that likely would become a regular event, since every time we did a Census the party in power in the most states would be able to draw all the district lines to ensure they would win the presidency, every single time.
Now sure sometime the party in power in a year that ends in 0 might be the popular party when we have a presidential election, and so their guy would win either way. But more often then not, thats probably not going to be true. (your already seeing this in the House, even though the GOP held the majority they got a ton less votes overall then the democrats, because of gerrymandering...and to be fair the opposite was true when the dems drew the lines, again its not a party thing, this is just a bad idea that at the moment the GOP is proposing for short term gain)
In other-words under this new republican plan (which by the way they are already drawing up legislation for in 4 of those states) we would actually make the electoral college even less fair.
Bonus by the way for the state of Virginia, on Monday one of the state senators, who happened to be a democrat, when to see the presidential inauguration. Now normally the VA senate is split right down the middle 20 Dem's 20 Republicans. Now with this senator gone the GOP had a 1 day advantage so held a unscheduled vote to scrap the states previously approved new district lines in favor of much much much more jury rigged ones (rigged of course to favor republicans) and got the new plan through 20-19 due to the single missing democrat (in the case of a tie the LT gov, who would cast the tie breaking vote had already said he was against the idea) as the first step in their plan to introduce the new way of counting votes.
Which I suppose is good if your in the minority of Virginia who lives in the 8 congressional districts the next republican will win (which actually will likely jump to 9 if the new plan is approved). Not so good if your in the majority of Virginia who live in the 3 (soon to be 2) districts who actually voted for the state wide winner.
But hey remember every vote counts......until they vote against you.....
EDIT: Yea so I made a small mistake concerning VA. While its true (as far as I can tell) that in the other 5 states the two senatorial electoral votes will go to the popular vote winner, in Virginia the plan is actually to give them to the person who won the most congressional districts.
In otherwords under the Virginia plan Obama's 3 point win would have netted him 3 electoral votes to Mitt Romney's 10. So yea the losing candidate in the popular vote would get more then 3 times the electoral vote.
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