Bad idea
Pennsylvania Republicans are gearing up behind a plan to completely overhaul — or wreck, depending on your politics — the way electoral votes are awarded to presidential candidates in Pennsylvania.
The proposal, which has drawn national media attention and plenty of disdain, was put forth by state Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi. Pennsylvania awards all of its electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the statewide popular vote, as do 47 other states. Starting next year, Pileggi wants to award 18 electoral votes based on election results in each of the 18 congressional districts and to award the remaining two electoral votes to the candidate who wins the statewide vote. Gov. Tom Corbett, who says he favors a plan, says the change would more accurately reflect the will of the voters.
That’s what he says. But it doesn’t take a cynic to see the real motivation behind the switch: Pennsylvania’s large bounty of electoral votes has gone Democratic in the last five presidential contests — if Pileggi and the other Republicans have their way, splitting those votes can have major national ramifications.
Take the 2008 presidential election, for example, Barack Obama won the state by 10 points, a significant margin. But thanks to gerrymandering, he would have won only 11 of the state’s 21 votes — nine districts, plus two votes for winning the popular vote.
With the GOP in control of the state, this year’s redistricting could produce an even more Republican-tilted congressional map. (This is done, most often, by stuffing as many Democratic voters into a few districts and spreading the rest in small numbers, diluting them everywhere else.) It’s not out of the question that Obama could win the state’s popular vote in 2012, but only win 9 electoral votes and the loser would get 11. Does that seem like a “more accurate way to reflect the will of the voters” to you?
The plan would also, despite claims by the GOP of making the system fairer, disenfranchise you, the voter. Rather than the current plan that gives each voter equal weight, voters in some congressional districts will have significantly more impact than others. That’s because, as mentioned above, the new system could easily find the loser of the state’s popular vote taking the bulk of our electoral votes by carrying the congressional districts.
And here in Fayette County we know all too well about how inane and geographically insane the state’s congressional districts are. After all, we have a little less than half of our county being represented by a guy who lives over two hours away in Hollidaysburg. The district, which stretches east to the outskirts of Harrisburg, is dominated by Republicans with Fayette County residents having absolutely no influence in who’s elected to the seat.
The other part of Fayette County, represented by U.S. Rep. Mark Critz, D-Johnstown, was designed to dump as many Democrats as possible into the late John Murtha’s district. It follows no geographic rhyme or reason, meandering from Washington County in the west to Cambria County in the east and Armstrong County to the north and Greene County to the south.
We also know that redistricting and the gerrymandering it produces is meant to benefit the party in power, and not the people who live in those districts. One needs only remember watching Democrats Murtha and the late U.S. Rep. Frank Mascara being forced to duke it out the last time the Republicans redrew the congressional map in 2000.
So even if the thought of cutting Obama out of a 2012 victory — no matter the cost — is music to your ears, this proposal is still a loser for Pennsylvania. At the national level, if the state gives up its “winner-take-all” electoral votes, we would no longer be a swing state, a priceless status that brings the candidates to our backyards and our issues to the national spotlight every four years. We would lose our powerful voice in determining our next president and those into the future and would be relegated to lower tier status.
All so the state GOP can shamelessly rig the rules in their favor.
It’s one thing to win by playing by the rules, it’s a completely different thing to change the rules to let you win. Even if you oppose Obama with every fiber of your being, do you want to sacrifice the integrity of our democracy to unseat him?
This isn’t about fairness or making the system better. If it was, the GOP wouldn’t have to have complete control of Harrisburg to ram it through.
It’s a blatant, transparent partisan move designed to help Republican presidential candidates. Simply put, Pennsylvania would lose under this plan. Voters would lose under this plan. Fairness would lose under this plan. There’s only one constituency that benefits from this plan: Republican politicians. This plan must be stopped in its tracks.