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| How the VA GOP electoral vote stealing scheme would look, courtesy of Huffington Post. |
Republicans don't feel like it worked though- they lost in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Michigan, Florida, and Wisconsin, and got no electoral votes from those states as a result, to name a few. So even though they lost clearly in those states, they want electoral votes from them. In fact, in Virginia they even went ahead and started moving on legislation that would radically change the electoral vote count from their state. If done nationally, it could essentially render public voting useless.
We live in a country where our House of Representatives is 234-201 in favor of the Republicans, even though they got 1.1 million less votes. If you now take the Presidency and make it not representative of the nation, then what? Why would people find this government to be legitimate? Why would they accept it? Being that we accept many of the things in this nation we don't like because of our democracy, could this not lead to a total breakdown of society? These proposals are very troubling.
4 comments:
I can understand why the plan would be opposed, but I don't see what is fundamentally wrong/illegal with it. The "rules" say the states decide how to allocate electors. The "Maine Rules" were an attempt to take advantage of flexibility allowed by the system. No one panicked at that point.
Its going to take a while to get rid of this kind of redistricting, since it was ok to do this in the 1990s for "good reasons" but suddenly bad for different reasons. An argument for principle.
This "they all do it" argument is off-base. In the 1990s, an average of 130 seats were considered "competitive." Now, it's under 50. What you have is pointless elections. If I had it my way, we'd make Congressional seats proportionally allocated in an at-large statewide election. I'd be fine with doing that Presidentially. With that said, I also would be fine if we went back to re-districting based on community needs, and not Congressmen.
I am actually arguing the opposite. creating communities of interest based on logical/compact geographic territories is more ideal. But its harder to say "gerrymandering bad" when people of the same political group were making the opposite argument 20 years ago, albeit for "good reasons."
Nothing illegal about the Virginia idea. Your argument is for better districting or broader electoral bases, not against a method of allocating electoral votes.
No, I would say my argument is that we should not allow gerrymandering for Congress, or allow gerrymandered districts to decide the President. I'm for the current, winner-take-all norm, or for proportional allocation across the board. There is a difference in what is legal, and what is acceptable. And again, what happened 20 years ago is apples to today's oranges.
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