Last August, Al Gore called for an end to the electoral college. That’s our system of indirect elections for President. When we go to the polls and vote, we vote for a group of electors, not the actual candidates. Members of the “electoral college” are chosen state-by-state, and the presidential candidate who wins the most electors wins the election.
In 2000, George W. Bush won the election by winning a majority of the electors, even though Al Gore had a half-million more popular votes. In 2012, the Republican party saw the system as so important to their election strategy that their Party Platform included “Protecting the Electoral College” as item #6.
Except, whoops, the 2012 election didn’t exactly turn out the way the GOP expected it to. (Remember Karl Rove’s election-night meltdown?) President Obama won re-election by more than three million votes. And so now some GOP politicians are following Al Gore’s lead and proposing reforms to the electoral college system.
Last week, the Los Angeles Times reported on GOP proposals to change the winner-take-all system “in half a dozen states, including Pennsylvania, Virginia and Michigan. All were presidential battlegrounds that President Obama carried last fall. But their state governments remain under Republican control, and some GOP lawmakers are pushing changes that would make it harder for Democrats to prevail in future contests.”
Whoa, that was a quick turn-around.
“Make it harder for Democrats to prevail” seems to be the key phrase here. Last summer, Bloomberg News warned that
“Across the country, the Republicans’ carefully orchestrated plan to make voting harder — let’s call it the Voter Suppression Project — may keep just enough young people and minorities from the polls that Republicans will soon be in charge of all three branches of the federal government.”
That didn’t quite happen, but not for lack of trying. By election day 2012, we had seen
- voter registration scandals in five states, tied to the same GOP consultant firm.
- the elimination, restriction, and rescheduling of early voting in at least five battleground states.
- “purging” of voting rolls in battleground states.
- voter ID laws passed in 33 states (including New Hampshire).
Read the NY Times editorial, tallying all the various ways Republican officials tried to affect the vote, here.
“Make it harder for Democrats to prevail.” These days, it doesn’t seem to matter to the GOP what route they take to that goal. Hire questionable consultants? Agree with Al Gore? Maybe even technological dirty tricks, as alleged by the group Anonymous?
The GOP is trying to win elections by manipulating the election system, rather than by earning votes. And that speaks volumes about how little faith they have in their policies and politicians.
If the party doesn’t have faith it its policies and politicians, why should we?