Heres a thought After

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Here’s a thought: After the last election many Democrats were, shall we say, rather unhappy with the electoral college. Of course, the college would be exceedingly difficult to abolish since it’s a boon to small states (whose votes get weighted more highly because of it) and you’d only need thirteen of those states to oppose it to block a constitutional amendment abolishing the college.

So, it’s not going to happen.

But the constitution doesn’t specify how the states allocate their electoral votes, just how many they have. The fact that all but two states hand out their electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis is purely a matter of convention. Two states — Nebraska and Maine — already hand out their votes by congressional district. So, for instance, if you win the popular vote in Maine you get the two electors who are proxies for the state’s two Senators. But you’d have to win both of the state’s congressional districts to get the other two electors who are proxies for the state’s House members.

Got it?

Anyway, after November, some opponents of the electoral college thought this might be a way to sort of half-abolish the electoral college. To press the college, as it were, a little further down toward the popular vote. A Democrat might get completely blown out of the water in Texas, say. But he or she’d probably grab a few votes in areas where Dems were strong. And vice-versa for Republicans in New York or Pennsylvania.

There are all sorts of practical problems with getting all the states to go along. But it seemed like a good idea.

Anyway, it turns out it’s a lousy idea.

Here’s why.

A few weeks back I was interviewing conservative activist Grover Norquist for an article about conservative efforts to combat voter fraud. Like many conservatives, Norquist believes that inner-cities, particularly minority and immigrant neighborhoods, are hotbeds of voter fraud. I think this is an entirely fallacious argument, with little to no factual support. But let’s leave that aside for a moment.

Norquist has an ingenious idea: while most conservative anti-voter fraud activists want to do things like require picture IDs, abolish Motor Voter, crackdown on alleged voting by non-citizens, Norquist has a more elegant, root-and-branch approach.

He proposes changing electoral votes in precisely the way I described above. Oddly enough, he opts for what we might call a demand-side approach to the problem (this is humor for really advanced TPM readers.)

In Norquist’s view, this removes all the incentives to rack up huge majorities in the central cities with fraudulent votes since it doesn’t really matter if you win Michigan’s 14th district (Detroit) with a big turnout or a small turnout, with a big margin or a small one. You still just get the same one electoral vote.

As Norquist described it to me, this reform would end the incentive for vote fraud and “cauterize” these hotbeds of corruption and prevent the evil from spreading out into other untouched areas.

Now, let’s step back for a minute and look at what this means.

First of all this would be an unmitigated disaster for Democrats. Here’s why: Democrats routinely win states by losing many of the congressional districts by close margins and racking up huge margins in the big cities. That’s basically what happened this year in Pennsylvania where massive voter mobilizations among African-Americans and organized labor pulled the state out for Gore in Philadelphia. If you make the Norquist reform you not only change the winner, you also short-circuit the impetus for Democratic core voters to get to the polls.

The reason Dems pull elections out in the big cities isn’t, as Norquist and other right-wingers, would have it, that they practice massive vote fraud. It’s because their voters are heavily concentrated in the cities. Make the reform Norquist proposes and you instantly short-circuit all the gains Dems have made of late in get-out-the-vote efforts. And you also massively diminish the electoral strength of African-Americans and other minorities.

In other words, substitute the words ‘high minority voter turnout’ for ‘voter fraud’ and you get a pretty idea what the Norquist reform would accomplish.

Like I said, a real lousy idea.

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