Votescam, Born Again, Dies Again
Hendrik Hertzberg
The New Yorker
Let it be recorded that, for the second time, Republicans have abandoned their effort to pinch twenty or so of California’s fifty-five electoral votes next November.
To remind: the idea was to put an initiative on the June ballot which, if passed, would have allocated the state’s electoral votes by Congressional district (with the two bonus votes going to the over-all winner), replacing the winner-take-all method used in every other state except four-vote Maine and five-vote Nebraska. (In neither of which has the statewide winner ever taken less than all, anyway.)
The sponsors of this monstrosity, it turned out, couldn’t raise enough money to hire enough temps to collect enough signatures to get the job done. The temps did their best—some of them tucked the Votescam petition under another one, for an initiative to help children with terminal cancer (video here)—but it wasn’t...enough.
Trying to split the electoral votes in just one state was a pretty obvious partisan scam. But plenty of people of good will are still under the misapprehension that Congressional-district allocation would be fine if every state did it.
It wouldn’t be. It would import all the flaws of Congressional-seat gerrymandering and misapportionment into the Presidential election. The status quo makes general-election campaigning (and voting) pointless in all but a dozen or so battleground states. Under universal Votescam, campaigning (and voting) would be pointless and all but forty or so battleground districts. This would not be an improvement.
There’s also a Democrats-only reason why universalizing Votescam would be a bad idea. Not just because of gerrymandering, but also because Democratic voters are apt to live in one-sided urban districts, nationwide Votescam would hand the Republicans a built-in electoral-vote majority when the popular vote is essentially a tie. In 2000, for example, Bush would have won “cleanly”—i.e., without Florida or the Supreme Court—despite Gore’s margin of a half-million more human beings.
I have made these points before, more than once, and I guess I’ll have to keep making them till the message gets through or the cows come home, whichever comes first.
(The article is here.)
The New Yorker
Let it be recorded that, for the second time, Republicans have abandoned their effort to pinch twenty or so of California’s fifty-five electoral votes next November.
To remind: the idea was to put an initiative on the June ballot which, if passed, would have allocated the state’s electoral votes by Congressional district (with the two bonus votes going to the over-all winner), replacing the winner-take-all method used in every other state except four-vote Maine and five-vote Nebraska. (In neither of which has the statewide winner ever taken less than all, anyway.)
The sponsors of this monstrosity, it turned out, couldn’t raise enough money to hire enough temps to collect enough signatures to get the job done. The temps did their best—some of them tucked the Votescam petition under another one, for an initiative to help children with terminal cancer (video here)—but it wasn’t...enough.
Trying to split the electoral votes in just one state was a pretty obvious partisan scam. But plenty of people of good will are still under the misapprehension that Congressional-district allocation would be fine if every state did it.
It wouldn’t be. It would import all the flaws of Congressional-seat gerrymandering and misapportionment into the Presidential election. The status quo makes general-election campaigning (and voting) pointless in all but a dozen or so battleground states. Under universal Votescam, campaigning (and voting) would be pointless and all but forty or so battleground districts. This would not be an improvement.
There’s also a Democrats-only reason why universalizing Votescam would be a bad idea. Not just because of gerrymandering, but also because Democratic voters are apt to live in one-sided urban districts, nationwide Votescam would hand the Republicans a built-in electoral-vote majority when the popular vote is essentially a tie. In 2000, for example, Bush would have won “cleanly”—i.e., without Florida or the Supreme Court—despite Gore’s margin of a half-million more human beings.
I have made these points before, more than once, and I guess I’ll have to keep making them till the message gets through or the cows come home, whichever comes first.
(The article is here.)
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