Salon.com > Electoral College

No red states, no blue states

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 12:00:00 +0000

When Virginian Thomas Jefferson provocatively wrote that the tree of liberty would have to be refreshed periodically with the blood of patriots and tyrants, he did not reckon on tyranny arising in the midst of the Virginia state Legislature from a creeping faction of smarmy hooligans primed to convert Democratic districts into Republican ones overnight. It’s in the news this week. But it’s been brewing ever since Bush v. Gore.

Someone’s always talking about dumping the general ticket plurality system – the way we have tallied the votes of the states in presidential elections since 1789 – in favor of the district system. By this means we would be tallying electoral votes one congressional district at a time rather than awarding all of a state’s electoral votes to a single candidate. Article Two, Section 1 of the Constitution says that each state legislature determines on its own how its presidential electors (i.e., those who comprise the Electoral College) are to be chosen.

Republicans push to change Electoral College in swing states

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 14:15:00 +0000

In an effort to cut into the Democrats' ability to win votes in battleground states in the next election, Republicans are pushing state legislatures to adopt changes to the Electoral College that would give them a clear advantage.

From the Washington Post:

In the vast majority of states, the presidential candidate who wins receives all of that state’s electoral votes. The proposed changes would instead apportion electoral votes by congressional district, a setup far more favorable to Republicans. Under such a system in Virginia, for instance, President Obama would have claimed four of the state’s 13 electoral votes in the 2012 election, rather than all of them.

Other states considering similar changes include Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, which share a common dynamic with Virginia: They went for Obama in the past two elections but are controlled by Republicans at the state level.

Nebraska and Maine have already passed laws like these; Virginia's House of Delegates passed a version of the bill on Wednesday, and its state Senate could vote on the plan next week.

Virginia GOP jumps on the deform-the-electoral vote bandwagon

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 12:45:00 +0000

First, Virginia Republicans pulled the old "surprise redistricting while a civil rights hero was out of town attending the president's inauguration on Martin Luther King Day" trick. That was just a prelude to the real show: Blatantly anti-democratic electoral vote rejiggering. A state Senate subcommittee recommended a bill to "apportion electors according to which presidential candidate carries each of the state's 11 congressional districts," replacing Virginia's current "winner-takes-all" system with one that would've given Mitt Romney a majority of Virginia's electoral votes in 2012.

Did Obama reset the electoral map?

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Mitt Romney visited President Obama for lunch at the White House today, and the final congressional recount ended in North Carolina. It's safe to say that the 2012 election is officially in the books. With the numbers official, it's time to revisit Salon's version of the electoral map, and see how the reds and blues have shifted.

As you may recall, we calibrate our state colors by taking into account not just presidential election results, but also senatorial, congressional and gubernatorial elections. We give each equal weight and generate a color from pure blue (see Massachusetts) to pure red (see Kansas). This gives a far more nuanced picture of how each state votes, and not just what they decide every four years.

Click the image below to see how the map changed as a result of the 2012 election. You may want to keep an eye on North Carolina and Virginia.

GOPer, Tea Partier have a last-ditch theory on how to get Romney elected

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 20:04:00 +0000

A Republican lawmaker in Idaho has picked up on a half-baked proposal floated by the founder of Tea Party Nation, which promises a last-ditch possibility that Mitt Romney could be elected.

It began with Judson Phillips of TPN, who explained on World Net Daily last week that there is still hope for Romney, if 17 of the 24 states that voted for him decline to participate in the Electoral College on December 17.

Phillips wrote:

According to the 12th Amendment, for the Electoral College to be able to select the president, it must have a quorum of two-thirds of the states voting. If enough states refuse to participate, the Electoral College will not have a quorum. If the Electoral College does not have a quorum or otherwise cannot vote or decide, then the responsibility for selecting the president and vice president devolves to the Congress.

The House of Representatives selects the president and the Senate selects the vice president.

Since the Republicans hold a majority in the House, presumably they would vote for Mitt Romney, and the Democrats in the Senate would vote for Joe Biden for vice president.

Let’s kill the electoral college so we never have to pay attention to Ohio and Florida again

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 17:12:00 +0000

The best argument for finally ridding ourselves of the Electoral College, besides that it is a regular reminder that our sainted Founding Fathers created an explicitly undemocratic and exclusionary form of government when they invented a system that no other country has been fool enough to imitate, is that it assigns far too weighty a responsibility to states that are completely incompetent and mostly run by horrible assholes.

And so this particular miserable election has come down to essentially three states: Florida, Virginia and Ohio. But mostly Ohio. Ohio is a depressing place already, as is much of the post-industrial Midwest, and this attention is not making them any happier. Florida is full of lunatics and run by criminals. Virginia might elect George Allen again. This is no way to run a country.