@Gospel mentioned it in the thread about Snyder getting re-elected as Michigan's governor, but I haven't seen talk of it elsewhere.
In Michigan's upcoming lame-duck session, Republicans could pass new legislation that would divide the state's Electoral College votes, so a Presidential candidate could lose the popular vote of the state, but still be awarded more Electoral votes.
Short version: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/...-College-count-for-partisan-gain?detail=email
Long version: http://archive.freep.com/article/20...Snyder-Barack-Obama-Mittt-Romney-popular-vote
In Michigan's upcoming lame-duck session, Republicans could pass new legislation that would divide the state's Electoral College votes, so a Presidential candidate could lose the popular vote of the state, but still be awarded more Electoral votes.
Short version: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/...-College-count-for-partisan-gain?detail=email
Columnist Susan J. Demas writes that Michigan Republicans "are primed to rig how Michigan awards its electoral votes in lame duck, when no one is paying attention."
Currently and throughout the nation's history, in all but Maine and Nebraska, states go with the winner-take-all approach when it comes to the Electoral College. But in the past few years, Republicans in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin have pondered formulas that award some portion of the electoral votes based on which presidential candidate wins each congressional district. They gave it up under intense pressure.
But Demas thinks retiring Michigan Rep. Peter Lund, who has twice introduced bills to split the state's electoral votes, wants to be GOP state chair. To boost his chances, he might push the legislature in its lame duck session to finally pass his proposal. The result?
Well, consider that Barack Obama thumped Mitt Romney by 10 points (almost 450,000 votes) in Michigan in 2012. Under the GOP electoral college plan, Romney would have taken more of our electoral votes anyway, because he won more congressional districts.
That kind of undermines the whole "one person, one vote" thing.
So how did Romney win more districts? It wasn't magic or even much skill. Every 10 years, we get new districts. The Legislature gets to draw the map, and Republicans were in charge this time around.
It's easy to see this as a thimble-sized issue. But if just five states had adopted the split-the-vote approach prior to the 2012 election, President Romney would have been sitting in the Oval Office 20 months. Here is what the results would have looked like: Florida's 29 Electoral votes for Obama, split 17-12 in favor of Romney; Michigan's 16 votes for Obama, split 9-7 in favor of Romney; Ohio's 18 votes for Obama, split 12-6 in favor of Romney; Pennsylvania's 20 votes for Obama, split 13-7 in favor of Romney; Virginia's 13 votes for Obama, split 8-5 in favor of Romney; Wisconsin's 10 votes for Obama, split 5-5 in favor of Romney. If the system had been installed nationwide, it would have given Romney even more electoral votes. And McCain would have won in 2008.
Real reform, as opposed to this partisan maneuvering, would require doing away with the Electoral College altogether, which would require the unlikelihood of passing a constitutional amendment or an approach such as that of National Popular Vote. The NPV advocates seek an interstate compact under which states agree to cast all their Electoral College votes to whomever wins the popular vote nationwide. To activate the compact takes agreement from states with 270 electoral votes. So far, 10 states and the District of Columbia have signed on for a total of 161 electoral votes.
If Michigan Republicans want to fix the anomalous Electoral College, they should pass legislation adding their state to the compact. But, of course, they are interested in rigging the system, not fixing it.
Long version: http://archive.freep.com/article/20...Snyder-Barack-Obama-Mittt-Romney-popular-vote
Will the next GOP presidential nominee lose Michigan’s popular vote but still come away with most of its electoral votes?
That’s what could happen if Republicans who control the state Legislature revive a scheme to change the way that Michigan’s 16 electoral votes are allocated in time for the 2016 presidential election, as Democrats suspect they are plotting to do late this year in the Legislature’s lame-duck session.
GOP lawmakers floated a proposal to apportion the state’s electoral votes by congressional district about a year ago, but retreated when critics in both parties noted it would have awarded most of Michigan’s electors to Mitt Romney in 2012, despite Barack Obama’s first-place finish in the state’s popular vote. But Democratic leaders fear the plan will resurface after this year’s legislative elections, when term-limited Republicans can wreak partisan mischief without fear of voter retaliation.
And although Gov. Rick Snyder concedes it might be unfair to change the rules before Michigan redraws its political boundaries after the 2020 census, he declines to rule out signing onto such a scheme if legislators send it to his desk.
“I don’t do hypotheticals,” Snyder said when I asked him, during a year-end visit with the Free Press Editorial Board, about whether he would sign a bill that awarded Michigan’s electoral votes by congressional district.
House Speaker Jase Bolger, R-Marshall, won’t say whether or when he will bring such a proposal to the floor. But when I pressed his spokesman about the issue last week, Bolger said in an e-mailed statement that he remains “interested in exploring how we can best ensure the votes of all Michiganders count in an election.”
“I’m not interested in driving to a particular election outcome,” the speaker said. “But I am open to ideas of options that might represent the will of voters better. The current winner-take-all system ignores the wishes of millions of Michigan votes and the voters who cast them.”
Civics 101
As those who paid attention in social studies class recall, voters in an American presidential election cast ballots not for a candidate, but for a slate of electors pledged to vote for that candidate when the Electoral College convenes the month after a presidential election.
Michigan is among the 48 states that award all their electoral votes to the candidate who finishes first in the statewide popular vote. (The two exceptions, Nebraska and Maine, account for just nine electoral votes between them.) In 2012, all 16 of Michigan’s electoral votes — one for each of the state’s two U.S. Senate seats and 14 congressional districts — were awarded to Barack Obama, who captured 54% of the statewide vote, or 449,313 more votes than Romney.
At first glance, the notion of awarding some of Michigan’s electoral votes to a second-place finisher like Romney might seem more equitable than the current winner-take-all formula. Why shouldn’t a candidate supported by 44 of every 100 Michigan voters shouldn’t get a proportional slice of the state’s electoral pie?
But what the GOP has proposed in the past isn’t a proportional division of Michigan’s electors. State Rep. Pete Lund, a Shelby Township Republican, has proposed a scheme that would award candidates an electoral vote for each congressional district they carried, with the remaining two electoral votes going to whichever candidate carried the popular vote statewide.
Still with me? Because this is where it gets tricky.
The last shall be first
Because Michigan’s political boundaries were redrawn after the 2010 census to give Republicans a decisive advantage in nine of the state’s 14 congressional districts, adopting a by-district scheme would tend to award most of the state’s electoral votes to the Republican presidential candidate in any reasonably close election, even if the Democratic candidate won the popular vote.
In 2012, for instance, when Obama garnered nearly a half million more votes in Michigan than Romney, the Republican nominee still managed to carry nine of the state’s 14 congressional districts. If the by-district scheme had been in place for that election, Romney would have collected nine of Michigan’s 16 electoral votes — not enough to change the national result, but enough to make Michigan a net win for Romney, notwithstanding his decisive drubbing in the statewide election.
Incidentally, Romney’s showing mirrored that of GOP House candidates, who won a 9-5 majority in Michigan’s congressional delegation despite amassing 241,000 fewer votes than their Democratic opponents.
Raising the stakes
Republicans have scarcely cornered the market on manipulating political boundaries to give their party’s candidates an advantage in states that are closely divided between Republican and Democratic voters.
The U.S. Constitution gives each state the authority to draw its own congressional districts. Typically, whichever party controls a state’s legislature when those boundaries are redrawn every 10 years endeavors to corral the opposing party’s voters into as few districts as possible, while spreading its own supporters across the most districts possible.
Still, the idea that a presidential candidate could win a state’s popular vote but end up losing most of its electoral votes to the runner-up seems outrageous on its face. So, when I began hearing that Republicans were planning to run legislation to implement such a scheme during this year’s lame-duck session, I turned to Gov. Snyder for reassurance that Democrats were just being paranoid.
Not on his agenda?
What I was hoping for, when Snyder visited the Free Press late last month to talk about his legislative priorities in the year ahead, was a straightforward, Chris Christie-like declaration that he would not sit still for any bill that threatened to turn the popular vote on its head.
You know, something like: “Obviously, any bill that effectively awarded most of Michigan’s electoral votes to a second-place finisher would be unfair, and I would never sign it.”
At the very least, I figured, Snyder would insist such a scheme is not on his agenda. But what he said when I asked him about the chances of an overhaul of Michigan’s electoral college rules was ... well, see for yourself:
Me: If the Legislature were to pass legislation assigning Michigan’s presidential electors by congressional district, would you sign it?
Snyder: Well, again, I don’t do hypotheticals like that. What I’m happy to share with you on that is I think I have some real issues and concerns about the concept of changing the methodology. Not necessarily the methodology, but the timing of a change of that methodology.
It’s a different question when you’re in the middle of a period changing rules like that versus saying, if you look to say a census was coming and it was going to apply to everybody fairly and no one knew the answer for sure, that’s a different kind of question.
Me: So legislation that put such a change in place for, say, 2020 would be more attractive to you than legislation that put it in place for 2016?
Snyder: Well, again, that’s the way I would view it. If it’s that situation where there’s enough issues where it’s not guaranteeing one side an advantage or not, but you could argue it could be an improvement or it could be an impediment, but it’s just a change that has some rational arguments, that’s a different discussion point than saying it’s kind of, you know, tilting the playing field.
Me: Just to make sure I understand, you’re not saying that you wouldn’t sign such legislation if it came out of lame duck next December?
Snyder: What I’m saying is I don’t address hypotheticals in that context.
I’d like to think that Snyder is just playing his cards close to his vest, hoping to maximize his leverage with lawmakers in both parties by keeping his options open. I’d like to think that, in the end, he’ll draw back from the folly of any electoral scheme that threatens to subvert the popular will.
But the record doesn’t support such a Pollyannish view. If GOP legislators put a bill changing Michigan’s electoral rules on Snyder’s desk, chances are he would sign it.
“Obviously, we’re very concerned about it,” says House Minority Leader Tim Greimel, D-Auburn Hills. “It’s something being talked about in a lot of states where Republicans control the state legislature but tend to lose the presidential vote.”
State Democratic Party Chairman Lon Johnson says Michigan Republicans “don’t like what the demographics are telling them about their chances in future presidential elections, so their only option is to change the rules, bend the infrastructure of democracy.”
As for Snyder’s hint that he would discourage legislation changing the rules in time for the 2016 election, Johnson snapped: “I don’t believe for a minute that he won’t sign a bill if (legislators) put it on his desk.”
The only option for voters who want to see the integrity of their presidential vote preserved is to demand that candidates seeking re-election to the Legislature this November make it clear whether they’ll support election rules that honor the people’s verdict or conspire in a partisan scheme to hijack Michigan’s electoral vote.
Michigan gonna Michigan
