Over the past 10 days, the news about the Republican Party’s attempt to rig presidential elections in key states has exploded across the media spectrum, exposing the GOP’s scheme to circumvent the Electoral College and grab undeserved wins for the presidency.
But the hot spotlight of the media has apparently made some Republicans red-faced, embarrassed about their multi-million dollar plan to illegitimately and immorally turn Blue States to red in their quest to regain the White House.
At issue here is a stealthy plan called REDMAP, launched in 2011 at a cost of $30 million, to help gerrymander congressional districts in the Republicans’ favor in several states. The second phase of this scheme was to transform presidential elections in those states to a proportional allocation of Electoral College votes, based on the voting in individual congressional districts, not a winner-take-all approach based on the popular vote.
Essentially, the plan is this: Create a system that allows GOP presidential candidates to carry battleground states in which they lost the election by hundreds of thousands of votes.
In Michigan, the leading advocate of this crafty approach is one of our own, state Rep. Pete Lund, a Shelby Township Republican. Gov. Rick Snyder, who seems to be dancing in circles since the start of the Legislature’s December lame-duck session – always stepping to the right – said last week that he “could go either way” on the proposal.
On a national scale, a top supporter of this nonsense is Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, who was just re-elected as head of the RNC on Friday in a near-unanimous vote. Priebus has made clear his intentions to implement the by-district voting only in competitive states that Obama won in November.
So, what would the impact be of adopting this cynical system? Key states such as Florida, Wisconsin, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio are targets of this little trick but Michigan, by far, would have experienced the most grossly undemocratic outcome in the 2012 election:
* If Lund’s plan had been in place last fall, Mitt Romney would have received nine electoral votes in Michigan, based on the number of districts he carried. Obama would have been allotted just five of the district-based electoral votes, though he carried the state by nearly 450,000 votes.
Of course, the reason for these huge disparities is the squiggly district lines drawn by Republican legislators to give the GOP maximum advantage. The president won the state with a solid 52.4 percent to 44.7 edge. Yet, the Republican plan would have given Romney a 9-7 win (with two votes going to Obama based on statewide results).
* The outcome would have been the same in nearly all swing states. For example, a 7 percentage point edge in the Wisconsin popular vote for Obama would have been wiped out by a 5-3 majority in congressional district voting for Romney. (Keep in mind that each state, based on their number of senators, awards two electoral votes linked to the statewide vote.)
* A 5 percentage point win for Obama granted by the people of Pennsylvania would turn into a 13-5 margin in congressional district voting for Romney.
* A 3-point popular vote victory for Obama in Virginia would be erased by an 8-3 majority for Romney in district voting.
* A 2-point victory in all-important Ohio for the president would be trumped by a 12-4 edge for Romney in district voting -- a 12-vote electoral shift to benefit the Republicans.
* A 1 percent squeaker for the Democratic incumbent in Florida would become a 17-10 advantage for the GOP nominee in proportional voting along tainted district lines – a swing of 15 electoral votes in Romney’s favor.
* On a national basis, Obama routed Romney by a 5 million vote margin, but the GOP’s sleight-of-hand would have meant a Republican victory, with the former governor capturing 228 congressional districts, compared to 207 for the president.
Fortunately, key GOP officials, hoping to avoid stirring up a hornet’s nest, have expressed varying degrees of opposition to the REDMAP plan in the past several days. They include: Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, Florida House Speaker Will Weatherford, former Mississippi governor and ex-RNC chairman Haley Barbour, and controversial Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. Another opponent is Louisiana GOP Chairman Roger Villere, who also serves as an RNC vice chair.
As the 2012 national elections amply demonstrated, a growing GOP electoral disadvantage is emerging due to demographics. Increasingly, what transpires is that the Republican Party represent America’s rural areas and not much else.
In turn, the by-district voting plan to elect our president appears to be a transparent attempt to take advantage of partisan lines that compact blacks, Hispanics, single women and highly educated professionals into a few urban districts.
Let’s hope that, once this trickery is deflated, the public will focus on the sham process that is redistricting. Putting a collection of incumbent politicians in charge of drawing the maps, as conservative commentator George Will has said many times, means that “voters don’t pick their representative, the representatives choose their voters.”
Maybe a constitutional amendment (if needed) could require that the House not seat any representative-elect who was not elected in a square, compact district that reasonably reflects a state’s overall partisan divisions.
The unintended populist victory that could materialize from this ugliness is that voters may wake up to the increasing hyper-partisanship and polarization that has shamelessly made gerrymandering a national pastime every 10 years.
It is the scourge of our American election process.
In 2012, Democratic House candidates nationwide received nearly 1.4 million more votes than their Republican counterparts, yet the GOP maintained a 33-seat House majority. Does that constitute a republic? Is that representative democracy?
Or is it a little-too-clever, win-at-any-cost approach via cartography malpractice?
In a time when gridlock and partisan scheming and sleazy political maneuvers have become a standard flaw in America’s democracy, what will we have left if we accept rigged elections for our president and congressional leaders?
At issue here is a stealthy plan called REDMAP, launched in 2011 at a cost of $30 million, to help gerrymander congressional districts in the Republicans’ favor in several states. The second phase of this scheme was to transform presidential elections in those states to a proportional allocation of Electoral College votes, based on the voting in individual congressional districts, not a winner-take-all approach based on the popular vote.
Essentially, the plan is this: Create a system that allows GOP presidential candidates to carry battleground states in which they lost the election by hundreds of thousands of votes.
In Michigan, the leading advocate of this crafty approach is one of our own, state Rep. Pete Lund, a Shelby Township Republican. Gov. Rick Snyder, who seems to be dancing in circles since the start of the Legislature’s December lame-duck session – always stepping to the right – said last week that he “could go either way” on the proposal.
On a national scale, a top supporter of this nonsense is Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, who was just re-elected as head of the RNC on Friday in a near-unanimous vote. Priebus has made clear his intentions to implement the by-district voting only in competitive states that Obama won in November.
So, what would the impact be of adopting this cynical system? Key states such as Florida, Wisconsin, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio are targets of this little trick but Michigan, by far, would have experienced the most grossly undemocratic outcome in the 2012 election:
* If Lund’s plan had been in place last fall, Mitt Romney would have received nine electoral votes in Michigan, based on the number of districts he carried. Obama would have been allotted just five of the district-based electoral votes, though he carried the state by nearly 450,000 votes.
Of course, the reason for these huge disparities is the squiggly district lines drawn by Republican legislators to give the GOP maximum advantage. The president won the state with a solid 52.4 percent to 44.7 edge. Yet, the Republican plan would have given Romney a 9-7 win (with two votes going to Obama based on statewide results).
* The outcome would have been the same in nearly all swing states. For example, a 7 percentage point edge in the Wisconsin popular vote for Obama would have been wiped out by a 5-3 majority in congressional district voting for Romney. (Keep in mind that each state, based on their number of senators, awards two electoral votes linked to the statewide vote.)
* A 5 percentage point win for Obama granted by the people of Pennsylvania would turn into a 13-5 margin in congressional district voting for Romney.
* A 3-point popular vote victory for Obama in Virginia would be erased by an 8-3 majority for Romney in district voting.
* A 2-point victory in all-important Ohio for the president would be trumped by a 12-4 edge for Romney in district voting -- a 12-vote electoral shift to benefit the Republicans.
* A 1 percent squeaker for the Democratic incumbent in Florida would become a 17-10 advantage for the GOP nominee in proportional voting along tainted district lines – a swing of 15 electoral votes in Romney’s favor.
* On a national basis, Obama routed Romney by a 5 million vote margin, but the GOP’s sleight-of-hand would have meant a Republican victory, with the former governor capturing 228 congressional districts, compared to 207 for the president.
Fortunately, key GOP officials, hoping to avoid stirring up a hornet’s nest, have expressed varying degrees of opposition to the REDMAP plan in the past several days. They include: Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, Florida House Speaker Will Weatherford, former Mississippi governor and ex-RNC chairman Haley Barbour, and controversial Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. Another opponent is Louisiana GOP Chairman Roger Villere, who also serves as an RNC vice chair.
As the 2012 national elections amply demonstrated, a growing GOP electoral disadvantage is emerging due to demographics. Increasingly, what transpires is that the Republican Party represent America’s rural areas and not much else.
In turn, the by-district voting plan to elect our president appears to be a transparent attempt to take advantage of partisan lines that compact blacks, Hispanics, single women and highly educated professionals into a few urban districts.
Let’s hope that, once this trickery is deflated, the public will focus on the sham process that is redistricting. Putting a collection of incumbent politicians in charge of drawing the maps, as conservative commentator George Will has said many times, means that “voters don’t pick their representative, the representatives choose their voters.”
Maybe a constitutional amendment (if needed) could require that the House not seat any representative-elect who was not elected in a square, compact district that reasonably reflects a state’s overall partisan divisions.
The unintended populist victory that could materialize from this ugliness is that voters may wake up to the increasing hyper-partisanship and polarization that has shamelessly made gerrymandering a national pastime every 10 years.
It is the scourge of our American election process.
In 2012, Democratic House candidates nationwide received nearly 1.4 million more votes than their Republican counterparts, yet the GOP maintained a 33-seat House majority. Does that constitute a republic? Is that representative democracy?
Or is it a little-too-clever, win-at-any-cost approach via cartography malpractice?
In a time when gridlock and partisan scheming and sleazy political maneuvers have become a standard flaw in America’s democracy, what will we have left if we accept rigged elections for our president and congressional leaders?
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