Do Maine and Nebraska Have it Right?

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Democrats, still hurting after two losses in which their candidates won the popular vote but not the Presidency, have been making noise about eliminating the Electoral College (EC). Recently Tim Walz came out in favor of eliminating the EC, but he was quickly cautioned to not say the quiet part out loud again.

Many believe this to be sour grapes, another ploy to obtain the real desire; a one-party Democrat nation. Short of actual takeover by a foreign nation, or a nuclear holocaust, there is nothing that would be more damaging to our nation.

There exists a constitutional alternative worth considering, one that would accomplish two things: First, decrease the likelihood of a President elected while not winning the popular vote. Second, maintaining the equalization of voice of individual states in the process.

Currently Maine and Nebraska do this by allocating their EVs based on the winning candidate in each congressional district. The overall winner of the popular vote, in that state, is awarded the two senatorial EVs.

The question that begs to be asked is: if this had been done in past elections, what would be the impact? The table below illustrates this.

Looking at the above results two items are noteworthy:

• Only the outcome of one election would have changed: 2012 would have been a Romney victory,  pyrrhic though it may have been.
• Second, in all cases (except 2016) the Republican would have increased his electoral vote count.

The second point warrants further consideration, as we need to know the cause. One could say that there could be no significance in that, however the consistency of Republican increase in EVs would negate that argument.

The old adage that “all politics is local,” which is most closely associated with U.S. House Speaker Tip O’Neill, may provide the answer to this question.

Recall that Biden won in 2020 with a national margin of 7 million votes. But the local margins, the ones that determine the EVs were far closer. The vote differential of 43,000 votes in three states (AZ, GA, WI) would have putt the decision into Congress, to Trump’s advantage.

Biden’s victory was attained in three counties: Maricopa, Arizona, Fulton, Georgia and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  Using a winner-take-all system those three counties swung the election by 37 EVs. The impact of allocation by district would have taken the fraudulent vote out of the state count, placing it into the district count. The swing would not have been sufficient to alter the outcome of the election, but only to increase the Republican EV total.

This however represents a snapshot in the election systems used today and a “what if” scenario being applied to past situations. The allocation by district system, if used in all states (as it must be to be effective), would serve to discourage vote fraud, as the reward for fraud would be reduced.

Currently there are 75 Republican members of Congress elected in blue states and 48 Democrats elected in red states. The net potential pick up would be 27 EVs.

Looking at the above table, that trend, though it falls short, still represents a change in the positive direction. The average pick up in EVs is 21 electoral votes.

One could ask, if it rarely changes the outcome, then why bother with such a drastic change?

To answer that we need to look at what the Democrats are doing.

Last week, the loathsome congressman from Maryland, Jamie Raskin, said the following:

Trump was trying to interfere with the election process by “manipulating electoral college counts in Nebraska or manipulating the vote count in Georgia or imposing other kinds of impediments.”

The comment is particularly hypocritical considering that, if granted power, Democrats would push for statehood for D.C. (two additional EVs) and Puerto Rico (six additional EVs). The increase in EVs is the primary reason for such advocation.

Democrats, primarily, are also pushing for the National Popular Vote Compact (NPVC). Currently the NPVC has 209 EVs from 17 states signed on. The compact would take effect when 270 EVs is reached.

A look at their advisory board indicates how important this compact is to the future for the Democrats: Janet Napolitano, Eric Holder, Tom Campbell, Ben Jealous, Al Franken and others. Just to make the board ‘Bipartisan’ Michael Steele and former senator Jake Garn of Utah are included.

Make no mistake, if the NPVC comes to fruition, the odds of a Republican winning the Presidency will be greatly diminished. For those who argue the NPVC is unconstitutional, you are probably right, but that will be up to SCOTUS to decide and that decision is a roll of the dice.

To stop Democrats plans for one-party control, a drastic measure is required. Earlier it was mentioned that this scenario is constitutional — Maine and Nebraska prove that. But to work, all states must use it. This would require selling the plan to the public, as well as to 34 state legislatures.

 It would not be an easy task.

Image: Chessrat