If you can’t win at the ballot box, win in parliamentary maneuvering
Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida are starting legislative proposals to have the way their states award Presidential electoral college votes changed. Currently, it's a majority winner takes all approach. What's being proposed instead now is to use gerrymandered districts (redrawn in 2010 when Republicans took majorities in those states, and favors Republicans) and split the electoral votes accordingly. Meaning a presidential candidate could win the popular vote, but still be the loser in electoral votes (more about that later in this post, with a concrete example) And this strategy has been very effective: case in point: the House of Representatives. Hell the Republican State Leadership Committee has bragged about this on their Redmap 2012 website:
[More shade in here]
President Obama won reelection in 2012 by nearly 3 points nationally, and banked 126 more electoral votes than Governor Mitt Romney. Democratic candidates for the U.S. House won 1.1 million more votes than their Republican opponents. But the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives is a Republican and presides over a 33-seat House Republican majority during the 113th Congress. How? One needs to look no farther than four states that voted Democratic on a statewide level in 2012, yet elected a strong Republican delegation to represent them in Congress: Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Henry Marsh, Virginia Senator and civil rights veteran
Having seen the evidence of their sucess, their going to up the ante. Virginia is the first state this year to pass such a proposal on Monday. The state senate in Virginia is divided equally between Republican and Democrats (20-20), but on Monday while African American Senator Henry Marsh* left to attend the President's inauguration in Washington, D.C. Virginia Senate Republican leadership decided to celebrate Martin Luther King day (and their one vote advantage) by voting through their gerrymandered voting districts that favor, can you guess who and puts African American voters as a serious disadvantage. The vote on Monday was a complete surprise for state Democrats, who were blind sided by the move. After extremely limited debate (15 minutes), the bill passed by a single vote.1 And even Republican governor Bob McDonnell was taken back by the slickness of the move saying "it's not the way I would have done it."
The House of Delegates (where the proposed electoral vote is in committee) was touted by its sponsor Sen. Charles W. Carrico Sr. as essentially being more "fair" and argues that the current system punishes the more rural areas of the state (which Romney carried by 60 percent).2 What would have happened in the 2012 Presidential election had the new districts and the new proposed split electoral vote had been in place. President Obama would still have won by more than 145,000 but Mitt Romney would have carried the state.
Using the new districts and split electoral votes, Romney would have won Virginia in 2012
And here is a map of the key battle ground states and the implications if they decide to split their electoral votes based on the Republican redrawn districts:
I think the answer (and the most easy to do) is to remove state redistricting from politicians and appoint non-partisans like several states have already done. Discussions about reforming the electoral college are great, but that's not going anywhere and a non-starter. Non partisan redistricting can also stop the gridlock in Congress as well because it would effectively kill the "hyper-partisan" districts (especially in the House of Representatives), and create more moderate Representatives, since candidates would have to appeal to other elements in the other party, and not worried so much about being primaried. In fact Mike Bloomberg released a study in 2010:
such districts can increase the competitiveness of legislative elections at the state and federal level. In the most recent elections, the report found that across the country, 49 percent of candidates elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and 57 percent of candidates elected to state legislatures won their races with margins of victory greater than 30 points, or faced no opposition at all.3
Here is the entire segment about this from Rachel Maddow's program, it's extremely good and recommended viewing ;)
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* Senator Henry Marsh is veteran from the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, fighting to integrate Virginia schools in the 1950s and 1960s, and is 79 years old.
[1.] Va. Senate GOP springs redrawn lines on Democrats by Bob Lewis and Larry O’Dell for the AP.
[2.] Morning Read: GOP Senator Proposes Plan to Split Va.'s Electoral College Votes by Perry Stein: nbcwashington.com.
[3.] Nonpartisan Redistricting Would Increase Competition in NYC Elections mikebloomberg.com