Splitting a state’s electoral votes
New Hampshire is contemplating going the way of Maine and splitting its electoral votes:
Like 47 other states, New Hampshire currently awards all its electors to the winner of the state’s popular vote. Across the border in Maine, however, Donald Trump was able to pick up one of the state’s four EC votes by carrying. the second congressional district. He did the same in 2016 against Hillary Clinton.
In 2016, Trump won all five of Nebraska’s electors but shed one in 2020, losing the second congressional by more than 7 points to Biden…
If Sen. Bill Gannon’s proposed SB8 had been in place in 2016, Trump would have peeled off one of the Granite States EC votes from the First Congressional District — despite then-Rep. Carol Shea-Porter (D) winning re-election. In 2020, nothing would have changed, and all four electors would still have been awarded to the president-elect.
New Hampshire is such a tiny state it probably will never matter in a presidential election, even if the Electoral College manages to survive any Democrat attempt to jettison it. But other larger states might follow suit, and that could matter. Generally I think it would tend to favor Republicans, but – as the example of Nebraska this year shows – not always.
There is Bill in the Nebraska Unicameral to stop this insanity. The GOP has the majority in our supposedly non-partisan Legislature so maybe now it will pass.
My point is that the states joined the Union as one state; not a number of Congressional Districts. It also splits state unity. Nebraska est divist tres partes. And one part is CD #2 which is the Omaha Metro. It has become liberal over the years.
I’m a big booster for the entire state of NE. Surprise! It shocks me when I learn that Omaha people have never been to our Sandhills or haven’t been on our Sandhills rivers to tube or canoe. We need to stay unified. We need more than Cornhusker football to keep us together.
The EC was created because the founders feared candidates with deep but regional appeal. They didn’t envision states where a single county in which a candidate gets 60 or 70 % of the vote is the balance in every election e.g. CO, PA, Mich, WI, CO, WA, OR, FL, NV, IL, MN. I think this is a good idea but it will never be adopted in states where the left keeps enough people in one county separate, scared, poor and dependent to win most statewide elections.
Cornhead: Be realistic. I live in E. Wash. There is no unity between most of the state and King County. I think the same would be said of the states I list above and their dominant counties.
I can’t see why a state should be winner-take-all in electoral votes. Others may (and do) differ, and that’s okay.
One way to do it is for each state’s electoral votes to be winner-take-all for two electoral votes, corresponding to two senators for each state; and a winner in each congressional district, corresponding to however many representatives the state enjoys. The two electors would be a nod to the individual states, and the winners in the congressional districts would be a nod to — well, the individual congressional districts.
(I have absolutely, utterly *no* idea whether this scheme favors Republicans or Democrats or whomever, and I have no intention of doing any back-of-the-envelope arithmetic in an attempt to find out.)
But then, there would be the problem of unequal congressional districts. Some contain many more voters than do others. Is it time to change the number of representatives in the House? I would imagine so; either that, or do a mass reapportioning of the entire House if 435 is to continue to be sacrosanct (it has been since 1911, anyway).
And then there will be the issue of geographic and demographic redistricting: above my pay grade! (Also, I don’t want to touch the topic with the proverbial ten-foot pole.)
How about we create some new states? Eastern Washington, Eastern Oregon, Northern California, Northern Nevada, Western Colorado, Southern Illinois, Northern New York, etc. Let the libs have D.C. and Puerto Rico as long as we get some states that are not dominated by small enclaves of dense populations.
Sure, some of the smaller states will go this way. But does anyone think that the big ones would? California? Don’t make me laugh.
I will qualify that: the larger red states just might. The Democrats would see it’s in their interest to split the votes of Florida or Texas, and the Republicans just might not see that, and go along. So as not to disenfranchise anyone, or something.
I think there should be an asterisk after the word “losing” in the phrase “losing the second congressional” district to Biden. The second district is Omaha, Nebraska’s largest city. There is no reason to think that cities in non-swing states did not participate in voter fraud. We out-state Minnesotans are concerned that voter fraud in the Twin Cities probably gave the state to Biden.
Cornhead: I got my B.A. in English History from University of Nebraska – Omaha. I was fortunate to study under A. Stanley Trickett. Omaha was quite conservative at that time.
J.J.:
One little catch – Congress has to approve as well, if a state is partitioned to create a new state. And now that the Democrats are in perpetual control of Congress, it won’t happen. Nor would state legislatures in blue states ever approve it.
I guess that’s two little catches.
Yes, how can we fix a rigged game in which we have no say?
Good luck trying to initiate reforms in a game of “heads we win, tails you lose”.
Yes, Neo, I knew it was a mission impossible. Sort of tongue in cheek comment to suggest that the D.C., Puerto Rico statehood idea could be foiled by agreeing if we can get some states as well. Though tongue in cheek, if we are to have some sort of political amity, something needs to be done to counter the big blue cities. Especially in what would otherwise be red states. A Republican state senator in WA has proposed hat we vote for governor using an electoral sort of system based on counties. It has no chance of passing, but puts the spotlight on the problem.
States will in general keep bloc voting all electoral college votes.
That is how a state maximizes its influence.
In an election where voters have different weights (51 voters in our electoral college), the probability to have the casting vote scales ability to have the casting vote scales roughly according to the square of the weight.
The Penrose method assigns weights according to the squareroot of the population represented.
US electoral college weights are a gut level approximation: states get three votes just for existing and then additional votes according to population. Kudos to the founders for codifying it in the 18th century.
Right now, the issue seems to be that big city machines deliver blocs within states. One-party urban vote harvesting gives cities power to swing a state out of proportion to the urban population. We’re not even delving into possible shenanigans here.
One of the tells for that is both state legislative houses controlled by one party with statewide offices controlled by the other.
A possible solution would be to curtail at-large state voting and substitute voting by district, a kind of mini-electoral collegte within states.
I do not know if that would ever pass into law. Imagine if (in Pennsylvania, say), the legislature defined 2000 districts by population, each 1/10 of a Penna State House district, and the presidential electors are decided by the majority of the 2000 districts. If the big city machine invents votes, that is still bad and still should be corrected. The big city machine cannot cast the whole election. Recounts and audits can be done per-district without affecting the others.
Reverse situation, national popular vote, is a nightmare, same argument.
If every state did it- Democrats would be hard put to win another presidential election.
RE: “New Hampshire is such a tiny state it probably will never matter in a presidential election, even if the Electoral College manages to survive any Democrat attempt to jettison it.”
Tiny NH may never matter AGAIN, but in 2000, G.W.Bush beat Gore by 271-to-266 electoral college votes. If Gore had managed to win NH (4 votes) or his home state of TN (11) votes, he would have won — regardless of what happened in FL. But he didn’t win either, so it all came down to the “recounts” in FL. If memory serves, multiple audits were done in FL after the election, and they all showed: (1) Bush won, and (2) they couldn’t reproduce the numbers published in DNC strongholds like Miami Dade and Broward Counties. The results were embarrassing to the DNC. (In thinking about those audits, the word “fraud” pops into my head, but I’m confident that the DNC learned their lesson. After the 2020 election, lots of physical evidence has been or will be destroyed so that the results cannot be audited.)
And, yes, Gore lost multiple states, but NH should have been an easy win for him in 2000. NH went for the DNC candidate in 1992, 1996, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020.
None of this will matter because regardless of how cute the proposed mechanism, they’re just going to open the immigration and naturalization floodgates and swamp you.
Before engaging in the Constitutional Glass Bead Game, suggest wise to spend next decades honing ways and means of encouraging Fellaheen to come to realization that they might live longer, happier, more productive lives elsewhere. This will involve nocturnal yard work and more.
Mencken may have been half in jest about Hoisting the Black Flag. I don’t see much to laugh about, ‘going forward’ (as our Bugmen Overlords like to say in their endless bloody meetings).
MJR: I agree with your proposal. As far as unequal Congressional districts that is no different than each state having 2 Senators regardless of population. Whether the scheme favors one party or the other is not as important as the scheme being fair to all voters in each state.
Justice for Ashli Babbitt!
This is a TERRIBLE idea for Republicans. It changes the voter outreach from a geographic one to a socio demographic one which is suburban white women. Using my sister as an example, suburban white women tend to be apolitical, CONFORMING to the general culture, safety oriented and polite. They voted for Obama because that was the thing to do and those ads make Romney look like a meanie. Robust talk turns them off. This is the demographic that would be fought over. Guess who wins that demographic the majority of time. I am sure that the Nebraska congressional district vote split initiative was driven by liberals who were tired of the rest of the state overwhelming their local vote. Begley can give us some insight on that.
This means that the fight would shift to urban areas. Trump wouldn’t have gone to Dalton Georgia, Grand Rapids Michigan, Warren MI, Dayton Ohio or other more remote places. The campaign would be fought in NYC, Boston, Detroit, Houston, Phoenix, Orlando Miami, Tampa, Atlanta, and Chicago.
Disregard the map of counties where Republican won. There aren’t enough people in them. Look at where the density of congressional districts are per state. Sure Republican will pick up California Inland Empire and Eastern Washington/Oregon. Also downstate Illinois. But they give up Houston/Dallas/El Paso in Texas, New Orleans in Louisiana, Miami, Orlando and Tampa in Florida, Charleston in South Carolina, Cleveland, Toledo, Cincinnati and Columbus in Ohio, Indianapolis in Indiana and so forth and so forth.
This means that urban/suburban concerns rule even more over rural and the ex-burbs. Gaia worship would be the new religion. No keep the states unitary and make the fight over geographic concerns.
One big lack in the constitution is a statement about how small a state can be.
Why is this important?
Suppose political party A controls a state and both houses of Congress. It can then, constitutionally, have its state request to be split up into, say, 10,000 mini-states. Congress, also being controlled by party A, approves. Each state must be given two senators and at least one member of the House. As long as each mini-state has at least 3 people inside it — two to be state senators and one to be a member of the House — the constitution as currently written has no objection. The number of electoral votes each mini-state has is at least three — two for the senators and one for the member of the House of Reps.
Local politicians would be ecstatic — all those extra state governor and state legislative positions to be filled. In that sense it could turn out to be a very popular move!
Doing the math: That’s 20,000 additional votes for party A in the Senate; at least 10,000 additional votes for party A in the House; and at least 30,000 additional votes in the Electoral College. The first party to do this maneuver gets to control all three branches of the government indefinitely because, now that they always control Congress, they will not approve any similar split-up of states controlled by another party.
I would be happy to be set straight about why this would not work — but isn’t it basically what the Democrats are trying to do now with turning DC and Puerto Rico into states? Really, it looks like they are being pikers settling for just two extra states when they could have so many more.
I’m totally in favor of this for California!
It would make us into more than an ATM machine for Presidential candidates.
Much profound discussion above.
But still they’re just going to amnesty the illegals and open the borders.
So why are we talking about lawyerly ifs and buts and maybes that are at best second or third order effects?.. Curlicues upon pediments which you won’t even see when the Great Brown Wave rolls over you.
Somebody please explain to me how I’m wrong.
I’m sure you guys have watched the movies about the Wansee Conference. Remember the gentleman civil servant from the Justice Ministry who was deeply concerned that some i’s weren’t being dotted and t’s not crossed?
Big Picture, People. Big Picture.
Big Picture. All Commies Are Bastards, skin color don’t matter.
Forest and Trees.
Brown Wave? Ever heard of the Yellow Peril? Or those damned papish Irish, or Italians?
duh, bro.
*Wannsee… Keep tripping over in these damn jackboots.
All shock no awe.