There’s an idea emerging from Republican circles that would change the way electoral votes are counted in presidential elections — with potentially highly undemocratic results. Instead of awarding the electoral votes to the popular vote winner in each state, they’d be divided by congressional districts — but only in a select group of “swing” states where congressional districts have been heavily gerrymandered to favor Republicans.
One of the key players pushing this idea is former Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.
As The Atlantic reveals,
Jordan Gehrke, a D.C.-based strategist who’s worked on presidential and Senate campaigns, is teaming up with Ken Blackwell, a former Ohio Republican secretary of state, to raise money for an effort to propose similar electoral reforms in states across the country…
Gehrke and Blackwell have been talking to major donors and plan to send a fundraising email to grassroots conservatives early next week. The money would go toward promoting similar plans to apportion electoral votes by congressional district in states across the country, potentially even hiring lobbyists in state capitals.
You may remember Blackwell.
He was the guy in charge of Ohio’s contentious 2004 presidential election, which drew unfavorable international attention to Ohio after voters here had to wait (often in the cold and rain) for as long as 12 hours — but just in urban areas and on some liberal college campuses, where voters tended to vote Democratic. And afterward, he gloated that everything had gone just swimmingly.
Current Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted mentioned the possibility of implementing this new form of vote counting at a forum in Columbus the week after this past November’s election. He backed off quickly after his remarks went public. And last week in Virginia, where it was introduced into the legislature, it died after it attracted attention, causing a couple of Republican legislators and the state’s Republican governor to announce their non-support.
If electoral votes were distributed in the manner proposed by Blackwell and his cohorts, Mitt Romney would be president now, despite losing the election by nearly five million popular votes.
That’s democracy in action!