Jonathan Alcorn/ZUMAPress
In September, top Pennsylvania Republicans shocked the nation by
proposing a change to the state's election rules
that would have rigged the Electoral College in favor of Mitt Romney.
Facing a nationwide backlash, the state's GOP backed down—but not before
Wisconsin Republicans considered a similar plan. With the old rules still in place, President Barack Obama won a 332-206 electoral college victory over Romney.
But
now that Romney has been defeated, prominent GOPers are once again
mulling rule changes that could make it harder for Democrats to win the
White House—and easier for Republicans to claim Electoral College votes
in states where they lose the popular vote.
Remember, the
presidential election isn't a nationwide contest, it's a state-by-state
fight, with each state worth a certain number of electoral votes (the
District of Columbia gets 3, too). There are 538 electoral votes total;
if you win 270 or more, you're headed to the White House—even, as George
W. Bush can assure you, if you don't win the popular vote. The
Constitution allows each state to allocate electoral votes however it
wants, but in every state except for Nebraska and Maine, the contest is
winner-take-all. If you get the most votes in Pennsylvania, you get all
of its electoral votes.
Republicans want to change that. On
December 3, Dominic Pileggi, the powerful Republican majority leader of
the Pennsylvania state Senate,
announced that he plans to introduce legislation
that would change how the state allocates its electoral votes. This
shouldn't be a surprise: Pileggi was one of the Pennsylvania politicians
behind the pre-election plan to change Electoral College rules.
Before the election, Pileggi's plan (
backed by a mysterious dark-money group called All Votes Matter) was
to allocate electoral votes by congressional district, with the winner
of each district receiving one electoral vote and the statewide winner
getting a two-electoral-vote bonus. That might not seem like a big deal.
But Pennsylvania,
like other blue states in the upper Midwest,
was subjected to a very effective Republican gerrymander after the 2010
midterm elections. Republicans won 13 of its 18 districts in 2012, so
if Pileggi's pre-election plan had been in effect, Obama could have been
awarded as few as 7 of Pennsylvania's 20 electoral votes, despite
winning the state.
Pileggi's post-election scheme has a new
twist. Instead of awarding electoral votes by congressional district, it
would award them in relation to the statewide popular vote, with a
two-electoral-vote bonus for the winner. That would prevent blatantly
undemocratic effects like a candidate losing a state's popular vote but
still winning its electoral votes. But it would still have a similar
effect to Pileggi's earlier idea—it would ensure that at least some of
Pennsylvania's 20 electoral votes, which have gone to Democrats in every
election since 1992, would go to Republicans. In a close election, that
could change the outcome.
Pileggi
has said
his new plan "much more accurately reflects the will of the voters in
our state." (He did not respond to a request for comment.) Dems say that
misses the point. "The Republican legislature has been brutally honest
about wanting to move Pennsylvania into the Republican column," says
Daniel Roth, a spokesman for the Democratic Legislative Campaign
Committee, which works to elect Dems to state legislatures. "They
wouldn't be doing this if Pennsylvania had gone Republican in the past
six elections. This is clearly an attempt to move electoral votes to the
Republican column because they know they cannot win the state."
Roth
has a point: The states where Republicans have proposed changing
Electoral College rules—Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where legislation
has been introduced, and Michigan and Ohio, where activists have pushed
the idea (see below)—went for Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012. There
are no such GOP proposals, for example, in deep-red Texas.
Jim Burn, the chair of the state Democratic party, called Pileggi's plan "the ultimate sour grapes" in
a statement posted to the party's blog.
"After getting swept in statewide elections, Pennsylvania Republicans
are trying to change the rules to help Republican politicians... They
are again trying to pass a bill that changes the rules simply to benefit
Republican politicians who have been rejected by the majority of
Pennsylvanians."
Pileggi isn't the only GOPer mulling a change to
Electoral College rules after Obama's victory. At a conference last
month, John Husted, Ohio's Republican secretary of state, said
the state could make its elections less controversial
by awarding its electoral votes by congressional district. Since Ohio,
like Pennsylvania, has a congressional district map that was
gerrymandered by Republicans, this idea, if in effect in 2012, would
have handed the majority of the state's electoral votes to Romney. But
Husted, it seems, misjudged what would make Ohio elections less
controversial—after national attention, he
backed off his comment, saying he wasn't "advocating" a change, just speaking theoretically.
At the
National Review's influential blog
The Corner, Rich Lowry was similarly cautious when
mooting the idea of Electoral College changes
that could boost Republicans' hopes. "A friend sends along this e-mail.
I post it, not as an endorsement but to encourage discussion," Lowry
wrote, introducing a long email endorsing awarding electoral votes by
congressional district. "From a political perspective, we simply cannot
allow the Democrats to have 220 electoral votes in the bag every single
election," Lowry's friend wrote. "That's the road to being a permanent
minority party." The solution? Change the rules.
narrative that they're the ones getting in the way of a fiscal cliff deal:
