This is a week in which “the dream” was overshadowed by the scheme on Richmond’s Capitol Square.
On Monday — the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday — state Sen. Henry L. Marsh III, D-Richmond, traveled to Washington to attend the inauguration of President Barack Obama. Republicans in the Virginia Senate exploited Marsh’s absence to secure a 20-19 vote along party lines in support of a favorable redistricting plan. This treatment of a venerable civil rights lawyer on the holiday of a civil rights icon landed Virginia (again) in the nation’s satirical crosshairs.
“How fitting,” said Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert. “In the words of Dr. King, ‘I have been to the mountaintop. And while I was there, they heavily redistricted the Promised Land.’ ”
Two days later, a Senate subcommittee advanced a bill that would apportion Virginia’s electoral votes by congressional district instead of the current winner-take-all system.
Eight of 11 congressional districts in Virginia are held by Republicans. Former GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney outpolled Obama in seven of those districts. Obama, who in November won Virginia by nearly 150,000 votes, would have lost a majority of Virginia’s 13 electoral votes under this proposed format.
Yes, our winner-take-all system is flawed. But loser-take-most makes a mockery of the democratic process.
According to Alan Abramowitz, a columnist for Larry Sabato’s “Crystal Ball” blog, Obama’s electoral vote margin would have been slashed from 332-206 to 271-267 if the congressional-district format had been used in six battleground states: Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.
Sabato, head of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, called the Senate bill “an outrageous effort to rig the system and undermine the democratic foundations of our republic.”
The GOP holds a 33-seat majority in the U.S. House. Sabato says what’s happening here is part of a larger Republican effort to tie electoral votes to congressional districts. Such a change “would permit a GOP nominee to capture the White House even while losing the popular vote by many millions,” he wrote Thursday.
“This is not a relatively small Electoral College ‘misfire’ on the order of 1888 or 2000,” he wrote, but “a corrupt and cynical maneuver to frustrate popular will and put a heavy thumb — the whole hand, in fact — on the scale for future Republican candidates.”
In 1888, President Grover Cleveland lost his re-election bid to Benjamin Harrison, despite winning a larger percentage of the popular vote.
We all know what happened in 2000. Where were these voices for electoral reform when Republican George W. Bush — who carried Virginia — became president despite losing the popular vote?
The Electoral College gives battleground states disproportionate influence in presidential elections. Also, the electoral method is rooted in the elitism and racism of the nation’s founders. It was an appeasement to slave-holding states to bolster the political power of the agrarian, less-populous South. The enslaved were counted as three-fifths of a person in apportioning electoral votes, despite lacking citizenship and voting rights.
But this proposal is no remedy.
“Our national policy is that we believe that the Electoral College should be abolished as undemocratic,” said Claire Guthrie Gastañaga, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia.
“That being said, the current situation will hardly be made more democratic by allotting the Electoral College votes based on congressional districts that have been cracked, packed and bleached to diminish the influence of minority voters as a force statewide.”
One in five Virginians are African-American and the state’s population is about one-third minority, but the state has only one majority-minority congressional district, represented by Rep. Robert C. “Bobby” Scott, D-3rd.
Nationally, there are two Electoral College outliers. Maine (1972) and Nebraska (1996) use the congressional district method. But FairVote, which has been calling for the popular-vote election of the president for more than a decade, has assailed the recent maneuvers as an attempt at partisan election-rigging.
Sen. Charles W. Carrico Sr., R-Grayson, the sponsor of the bill, says his rural constituents feel “that their voices are not heard” in presidential elections.
Before you cue the violin on behalf of Carrico’s constituents, you might want to consider the last half-century of Virginia political history. Before Obama, no Democratic presidential candidate had carried Virginia since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. And during the Byrd Machine era, Virginia’s rural locales had outsized influence.
Elections have winners and losers. Such is the ebb and flow of politics. Right now, the tide is unfavorable to Republicans in national elections. In Virginia, you can credit or curse the civil rights movement, the growth of Northern Virginia and the state’s increased ethnic diversity.
It’s difficult to view Carrico’s bill as anything but the latest GOP response to these unfavorable demographic shifts — or as some Democrats are calling it, a “sore losers” bill. A previous Republican gambit — voter ID measures that were viewed as an effort to suppress voter turnout — did not prevent Obama from being re-elected.
Any measure that takes us further from one person, one vote is a step in the wrong direction. This undemocratic bill needs to be killed without delay.
