from p. 1
come to the polls.” For more than a generation, black Virginians, who make up 19 percent of the electorate, had every reason to feel the same way, but Carrico never seemed to notice, much less care about their lack of a voice. And, they never complained in quite the way that he is doing now. More importantly, they never took the next step that he did in December: introducing a bill to split up Virginia’s electoral college votes. In doing so, nine of them would have gone to Romney (one for every congressional district he carried, plus two more for winning the most districts). This, compared to four for Obama—a better than 2-to-1 Romney advantage, even though Obama won a majority of the popular vote in the state. But Republicans have lost the national popular vote in every election since 1992, except one, and the solid Red states like Virginia and North Carolina are turning into battlegrounds. They’re getting desperate and cheating is starting to look mighty good. Indeed, Carrico isn’t just some isolated nut. And other Republicans do a much better sales job than he. “I think it’s something that a lot of states that have been consistently blue that are fully controlled red ought to be looking at,” Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in early January, adding the claim that it “gives more local control” to the states. But it’s only a select handful of states where Priebus and other Republicans seem to think it’s vitally important.
GOP Targets Six Blue States In Red Hands
Similar schemes have been put forward in five other states that Obama won, but which are completely controlled by Republicans at the state level. If all of them had had Carrico’s plan in place in the last election, Romney would be sitting in the White House right now, even though he lost the popular vote by almost 5 million votes.
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, below, reportedly said converting to a district-based apportioning of votes in the Electoral College, “gives more local control.” File photo.
In December, the National Journal reported that “senior Republicans in Washington” were “overseeing legislation” to implement districtbased systems in the three bluest of these states, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. And “in the long run,” they were eyeing Florida, Ohio, and Virginia as well. “You’d see a massive shift of electoral votes in states that are blue and fully [in] red control,” one anonymous senior Republican, described as “taking an active role in pushing the proposal” told the Journal. “There’s no kind of autopsy and outreach that can grab us those electoral votes that quickly,” he added. Of course, the popular vote loser has won the electoral college vote before—most recently in 2000. But under the existing system, these are rare flukes. The GOP’s new plans would turn a bug into a feature. “This is not a relatively small Electoral College ‘misfire’ on the order of 1888 or 2000,” wrote Larry Sabato, director of University of Virginia Center for Politics, the center’s “Crystal Ball” election prediction and analysis website. “Instead, it is a corrupt and cynical maneuver to
frustrate popular will and put a heavy thumb— the whole hand, in fact—on the scale for future Republican candidates. We do not play presidential politics with a golf handicap awarded to the weaker side.” Sabato’s harsh response was typical of the reaction these plans have met as the national media has belatedly noticed what Republicans are up to in these states. As a result, most of the proponents have beaten a hasty retreat. Carrico’s bill suffered a lopsided 11-4 ‘no’ vote in a key committee on Jan. 29, for example, while other state’s GOP leaders have signaled no desire to even go that far. But the GOP is in dire straits so far as presidential politics are concerned, so there’s a very real chance that these schemes could reappear much closer to the 2016 election, when non-
partisan voices like Sabato’s are drowned out by the daily campaign din, and Democrats have no time to organize an effective counter-move. We could, in short, be headed for a deliberately preplanned stolen election—not just in one state, as happened in Florida in 2000, but from a coordinated national effort. What makes Carrico’s scheme possible are two things: First, the Electoral College system itself allows states to allocate their votes in any way they see fit. There isn’t even a requirement that citizens be allowed to vote at all. State legislatures could simply select them directly—at least as far as the U.S. Constitution is concerned. In fact, two states—Maine and Nebraska—already use a variant of Carrico’s scheme, assigning one electoral vote per district plus two for the overall winner of the popular vote. But unlike the large, diverse states recently contemplating the change, those homogeneous small-population states barely register any effect at all. Maine has used the system since 1972 and Nebraska since 1992, but only one electoral vote has ever been cast for a candidate who didn’t win the statewide vote. The second thing that makes Carrico’s scheme possible is the preexistence of extreme gerrymandering in the states involved. As Random Lengths reported immediately after the election, Obama carried the six states mentioned and narrowly lost North Carolina with an average margin of around three percent, while Republicans won the House seats from these states in a landslide, 7334, better than 2-1 Republican. Had these states had split their delegations 54-53, roughly in line with how their people voted, Democrats would have gained enough seats to retake control of the House. While there’s academic literature arguing that districting itself is to blame, simply because Democrats are more densely packed into urban areas, there are at least three things that argue against this view. First is the just-noted fact that only seven states account for virtually all the partisan imbalance. Second, there’s the dramatic shift in partisan imbalance that’s taken place so GOP Schemes to Rig The Vote/ to p. 17
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