RNC’s Priebus Proposes to Rig Electoral College so Losing Republicans Can ‘Win’
A few weeks ago I posted half in jest that there would be a call by the GOP to mess around with the Electoral College by Romney offering a million dollars to the Electors if they voted for him as president (it is not illegal as far as I know to bribe an Elector for his vote - a loop hole you can write a thriller novel about). Like I said, I was kidding. But then the real life GOP proves me wrong and shows they view reality in ways I assume is a joke….
RNC’s Priebus Proposes to Rig Electoral College so Losing Republicans Can ‘Win’
John Nichols on January 14, 2013 - 10:15 AM ETFresh from claiming the GOP’s 2012 run was ‘a great campaign—a nine-month campaignrdquo; that only went awry at the end, Republican National Committee chairman Reince P&riebus now wants to rig the Electoral College so that when Republicans lose they still might ‘win.’
Specifically, Priebus is urging Republican governors and legislators to take up what was once a fringe scheme to change the rule for distribution of Electoral College votes. Under the Priebus plan, electoral votes from battleground states such as Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin and other states that now regularly back Democrats for president would be allocated not to the statewide winner but to the winners of individual congressional districts.
Because of gerrymandering by Republican governors and legislators, and the concentration of Democratic votes in urban areas and college towns, divvying up Electoral College votes based on congressional district wins would yield significantly better results for the GOP. In Wisconsin, where Democrat Barack Obama won in 2012 by a wider margin than he did nationally, the president would only have gotten half the electoral votes. In Pennsylvania, where Obama won easily, he would not have gotten the twenty electoral votes that he did; instead, under the Priebus plan, it would have been eight for Republican Mitt Romney, twelve for Barack Obama.
Nationwide, Obama won a sweeping popular-vote victory—with an almost 5-million ballot margin that made him the first president since Dwight Eisenhower to take more than 51 percent of the vote in two elections. That translated to a very comfortable 322-206 win in the Electoral College.
How would the 2012 results have changed if a Priebus plan had been in place? According to an analysis by Fair Vote-The Center for Voting and Democracy, the results would have been a dramatically closer and might even have yielded a Romney win.
Under the most commonly proposed district plan (the statewide winner gets two votes with the rest divided by congressional district) Obama would have secured the narrowest possible win: 270-268. Under more aggressive plans (including one that awards electoral votes by district and then gives the two statewide votes to the candidate who won the most districts), Romney would have won 280-258.
‘If Republicans in 2011 had abused their monopoly control of state government in several key swing states and passed new laws for allocating electoral votes, the exact same votes cast in the exact same way in the 2012 election would have converted Barack Obama’s advantage of nearly five million popular votes and 126 electoral votes into a resounding Electoral College defeat,’ explains FairVote’s Rob Richie.
This is something Priebus, a bare-knuckles pol who promoted a variety of voter-disenfranchisement schemes in 2012, well understands.
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Frank says: