Last November, while President Obama was beating Mitt Romney by almost five million votes in the presidential election, Democrats also received over one million more votes than Republicans for candidates for the House of Representatives. That fact might come as a surprise, but it is true. If you add up all the votes Democrats received in House races and all the votes Republicans received, the margin, in favor of the Democrats, was 1.1 million.
Thus, you may well assume, the Democrats must have regained the majority in the House of Representatives. They didn’t. Yes, they did pick up seven seats, thereby cutting into the Republicans’ advantage. But the Republicans maintained a sizeable majority in the lower house by virtue of the redistricting that had occurred in many states following the 2010 census.
By law, state legislatures are required to establish new voting districts after every national census (to comply with the one-person, one-vote rule set forth by the Supreme Court back in the 1960s). The idea is that as populations shift (through normal migration from town to town and state to state), old districts may no longer contain equal numbers of voters, and the requirement is that each Congressional district in a state contains approximately the same number of voters.
Sounds like a good rule, right? It should protect against a situation, for example, where a state sets up one district with 80 percent of its population and divides the other 20 percent among its other 10 allocated districts. A state, in so doing, could manipulate the voting for the House of Representatives so that the 10 districts all consisted of a majority of voters registered to one party, while the one district with the bulk of the population would perhaps have a majority of its voters registered to the other party.
In that manner, the “value” of the vote for those in the one large district would be significantly reduced, while the “value” of the vote for those in the smaller districts would be increased. But states aren’t allowed to engage in this kind of “malapportionment.”
What they are allowed to do, however, with relatively little limitation, is gerrymander (draw district boundaries that weigh heavily in favor or one party or another). And that practice is what many states do, indeed, engage in.
Pennsylvania is a good example. There, the Democratic candidates for the House received 48 percent of the votes and the Republican candidates received 52 percent. (President Obama carried the state against Mitt Romney by over five percentage points, thereby securing all 20 of its Electoral College votes.)
But instead of a nine to nine split of the state’s eighteen Congressional representatives (or maybe a 10 to 8 split in favor of the Republicans), thirteen Republicans were elected to Congress as against only five Democrats.
The Congressional results in Pennsylvania were due to the redistricting that the Republican-dominated legislature enacted following the 2010 election. You could chalk it up to simple politics, and certainly the Democrats do the same thing when they control the state legislature after a census, as they did in California, where the Congressional delegation elected last November numbers 38 Democrats and only 15 Republicans. (Democrats there got 61 percent of the votes, while Republicans got only 38 percent.)
But what if the Presidential election were determined by the same kind of gerrymandering? What if a state designated its allotted Electoral College votes, not on a winner-take-all basis, but by the vote in the separate Congressional districts?
In Pennsylvania such a method would have given Mitt Romney 13 Electoral College votes instead of the zero he received from that state, and President Obama would have received only 7 (the five from the Congressional districts he won plus the two “at-large” votes that every state automatically gets).
If only five states (Wisconsin, Ohio, Virginia, Michigan and Pennsylvania) whose legislatures re-districted in 2010 in favor of Republicans had implemented that method of allocating Electoral College votes before this last election, we would have seen Mitt Romney take the oath of office this week, instead of Barack Obama.
And that’s exactly what those five states are currently contemplating. In each, the legislature is controlled by the Republicans, as is the Governor’s office. Democrats in those states don’t have the ability to filibuster and the federal Constitution doesn’t prohibit a state from allocating its Electoral College votes in this manner. (Maine and Nebraska already do.)
This plan has largely been flying under the radar to this point. The national media hasn’t picked up on it, and the Obama administration doesn’t seem aware of it (or if those folks are, they aren’t making any noise about it; the president, of course, won’t be running again, in any event.)
It’s a bit of chicanery, to be sure, this Plan B to get their party’s nominee elected, but you have to hand it to the Republicans. They never give up. They don’t have a message that resonates with the majority of voters, but they’ll use any method to win the presidency. The voter suppression laws that several states enacted (to combat widespread voter fraud, don’t you know) kind of back-fired on them last year (as that tactic appears to have brought out even larger numbers of would-be disenfranchised voters). But the avenues to control of the Executive branch of government don’t end there.
The Electoral College is an anachronism and hardly the most democratic way to elect the country’s president. Its existence always makes possible the kind of result that occurred in 2000, when Al Gore received 500,000 more votes than George Bush but lost the presidency by three Electoral College votes (or one Supreme Court Justice’s vote, depending on how you look at it).
With a concerted drive spear-headed by Fox News and right-wing radio, the Republicans might actually get enough popular support for this “more democratic” way to elect the president to push it through in enough states to elect another Republican president who can’t win the popular vote.
And this time, they wouldn’t even need the Supreme Court.