According to TalkingPointsMemo.com, a liberal blog, there is a new effort under way among Republicans to gimmick the presidential elections, now that the boomlet of efforts to get states to pass laws allotting electoral votes by congressional district has died. It seems the new idea being pushed is to circumvent the Electoral College by getting enough states to pass laws allocating their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the popular vote, regardless of the outcome in the particular states. The plan is to make these laws [which have already been passed in a number of reliably Democratic states] take effect as soon as enough states have passed them to add up to at least 270 electoral votes.
The demographic shifts now in motion in America are steadily increasing the size of heavily Democratic sub-populations, thus making it ever harder for the Republicans to win the popular vote. The Republican Party has lost the popular vote in five out of the last six elections [including the 2000 Bush/Gore contest, in which Gore won the popular vote by 500,000.]
The purpose of the Electoral College originally was to protect smaller states from domination by larger states, and it continues to serve that function. California, with a population in excess of thirty eight million, gets 55 electoral votes, so each of its electoral votes represents 691,000 Californians. Wyoming, whose population is 573,000, gets 3 electoral votes, each of which represents 191,000 Wyomans. Since the Republican strength is concentrated for the most part in low-population states [Texas being the striking exception], any shift to a system by which the popular vote chooses the president can only serve to diminish the influence of deep red states.
Am I missing something?
