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Toasted Poster
Join Date: Oct 2014
Location: SoCal by way of Boston
Posts: 11,332
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Neo, stupidity doesn't look good on you.
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After President Obama swept all seven “toss-up” battleground states in the 2012 election, Republicans in Pennsylvania and Virginia, cheered on by national leaders of the party like RNC Chief Reince Priebus, have proposed bills to rig the way that electoral votes are counted in these states to favor a Republican candidate. Currently, the winner of the statewide vote takes all state electoral votes (except in Nebraska and Maine, neither of which offer a large number of electoral votes like larger battleground states). Under the system being proposed by Republicans, electoral votes would be allocated by congressional district, so that whichever presidential candidate received more votes in a given congressional district would win one electoral vote for that district. In Pennsylvania, the winner of the state popular vote would then be awarded two additional electoral votes. However, it’s even worse in Virginia, where those two extra electoral votes would be awarded to the candidates who won the most districts in total. It might sound complicated, but when you play it out, it’s clear that this is an affront to democracy.
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In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote by at least 450,000 votes, but lost the election due to an unprecedented Supreme Court decision
The GOP is strategizing on how to ensure the election of a Republican president in 2016, even if he or she receives a minority of the popular vote - but this time through a legal legislative strategy.
First, here is the background to what legislatures in some key electoral states, such as Michigan, are considering making into law. It begins with understanding gerrymandering, the creation of congressional districts in states every 10 years. In 2010, the Republicans, with a strong boost from the Tea Party, swept many state legislatures and governorships. State legislatures, not the federal government, determine congressional districts - and it has always been a highly partisan affair.
With precision software that can slice districts up in such a way that one party can win a state vote for Congress by a wide margin, gerrymandering allows for concentrating a disproportionate vote of one party in certain districts, while creating other districts where the margin of victory by the other party is smaller, but still virtually assured.
After the 2010 election, Republican victors in many states created safe districts for Republicans while concentrating Democratic voters in a limited number of generally urban districts. By segregating many Democratic votes by design, they reduced the likelihood that Democrats could be elected in other congressional districts.
How does this work? Let's take a hypothetical Detroit Congressional District where, let's say, 76% of the vote is predicted to be Democratic. Meanwhile, a suburban congressional district is created where the projection is that it will vote, on a generic party basis, 56% Republican. Since congressional districts have equal populations, the Democratic votes in those two districts would be 20% higher than the Republican votes. When you adapt such gerrymandering to an entire state, the result can be that Democrats win the popular vote of a state, but end up with fewer congressional representatives.
For a concrete example of how this plays out, look at the results of the 2012 congressional election. That year, according to BloombergBusiness, "nationwide, Democratic House candidates combined to win about 1.4 million more votes than Republicans." The result, however: The Republicans ended up with 234 congressional seats and the Democrats with 201.
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For a brief time in the fall of 2011, Pennsylvania GOP Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi unveiled a plan to deliver the bulk of his state’s electoral votes to Mitt Romney. Pileggi wanted Pennsylvania to award its electoral votes not via the winner-take-all system in place in forty-eight states but instead based on the winner of each Congressional district. Republicans, by virtue of controlling the redistricting process, held thirteen of eighteen congressional seats in Pennsylvania following the 2012 election. If Pileggi’s plan would have been in place on November 6, 2012, Romney would’ve captured thirteen of Pennsylvania’s twenty Electoral College votes, even though Obama carried the state with 52 percent of the vote.
In the wake of Romney’s defeat and the backfiring of GOP voter suppression efforts, Pileggi is resurrecting his plan (albeit in a slightly different form) and the idea of gerrymandering the Electoral College to boost the 2016 GOP presidential candidate is spreading to other GOP-controlled battleground states that Obama carried, like Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin. Thanks to big gains at the state legislative level in 2010, Republicans controlled the redistricting process in twenty states compared to seven for Democrats, drawing legislative and Congressional maps that will benefit their party for the next decade. (The Brennan Center for Justice estimates that Republicans picked up six additional House seats in 2012 due to redistricting.) Republicans now want to extend their redistricting advantage to the presidential realm.
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__________________
“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”
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