Why not just give cows the vote?
by digby
This interview with the slick GOP lawyer who's proposing to take the gerrymandered electoral college scam nationwide is amazing. He basically evades the questions with lugubrious bromides about "rural voters" while evoking stereotypes about city slickers (of the Detroit persuasion, if you know what I mean) stealing elections from the God Fearing Real Americans who deserve to run the country.
Here's the thing. The electoral college is an anachronistic throwback already, giving, as it does, power to individual states to override the popular will. It should be abolished. But instead of doing that they are attempting to "improve it" by having GOP states apportion their electors through gerrymandered congressional districts that allowed them to win the House of Representatives with fewer votes than the Democrats.
It's fairly astonishing that they seek to do this out in the open, but as they lose demographically they are getting more and more shameless in their attempts to game the system in the their favor.
Just look at this fatuous nonsense:
Q: If that's your goal, why not just get rid of the electoral college and elect presidents by pure popular vote?
A: Abolishing the electoral college is not something I support; it's what the Founders intended. This is not abolishing or getting around the electoral college at all. Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution gives exclusive plenary power to state legislatures to award electors in the manner in which they see fit. Massachusetts has changed the way they award their electors multiple times throughout history. There's a letter from Jefferson to the Virginia delegation asking, after he lost to Adams, to change the way they [awarded electors] before the next election.
Already, Maine and Nebraska award their electors in this way, and nobody seems to be outraged about it. The alternative is something like National Popular Vote [an interstate compact currently in place in eight states and D.C. that would award electors to the winner of the overall vote nationally]. It's just not practical -- folks have been trying to do it for years and they need a lot more states to get it done. It's not going to happen anytime soon. This [electoral votes by congressional district plan] is a practical solution to a real problem. State legislators anywhere can simply get together and say, hey, how do I get more attention for my state? How do I make sure every vote counts?
I'm not really here to argue for or against this or that electoral system. All I think we have to prove is that this is better than the current system. The current system's a mess.
Uhm no. It's not better than the current system. Since the Republicans are redrawing congressional districts in their favor every time some Democrat happens to leave town and they can sneak it through in the dark of night, it's actually a slow, systematic coup d'etat. After all, the plan is to win the presidency and lose the popular vote.
It goes on to argue that this will mean that candidates have to appeal to "everyone" which basically means spending most of their time in places where there are more cows than people. Why not just give cows the vote and call it a day?
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