By Ian
Millhiser on Jan 16, 2013 at 10:30 am
If The GOP Election Rigging Plan Were In Effect,
This Man Would Have Won The Electoral College Last November
Earlier this week, Republican National Committee
Chair Reince Priebus endorsed a Republican plan to rig the next presidential
election to make it nearly impossible for the Democratic candidate to win the
White House, no matter who the American people vote for. The election-rigging
plan, which would allocate electoral votes by congressional district rather
than by states as a whole in a handful of states that consistently vote for
Democratic presidential candidates, would haveallowed Mitt Romney to narrowly win the Electoral College last
November despite losing the popular vote by nearly four points.
On Monday, seven Pennsylvania Republican state
representatives introduced a bill to make this vote-rigging scheme a reality in their state.
Under their bill, the winner of Pennsylvania as a whole will receive only 2 of
the state’s 20 electoral votes, while “[e]ach of the remaining presidential
electors shall be elected in the presidential elector’s congressional
district.”
Pennsylvania is a blue state that voted for the
Democratic presidential candidate in every single presidential race for the last two decades,
so implementing the GOP election-rigging plan in Pennsylvania would make it
much harder for a Democrat to be elected to the White House. Moreover, because
of gerrymandering, it is overwhelmingly likely that the Republican candidate
will win a majority of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes even if the Democrat wins
the state by a very comfortable margin. Despite the fact that President Obama
won Pennsylvania by more than 5 points last November, Democrats carried only 5 of the state’s 18 congressional seats.
Accordingly, Obama would have likely won only 7 of the state’s 20 electoral
votes if the GOP vote rigging plan had been in effect last year.
One mitigating factor is that only 7 of the
Pennsylvania House’s 109 Republicans are original sponsors of
the election-rigging bill, so it is unclear that this is a major priority for
the GOP state house caucus. Nevertheless, both Gov. Tom Corbett (R-PA) and state Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R-PA)
support the plan, so there is a real risk that Pennsylvania Republicans will
try to write the voters out of the next presidential election.
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