I guess these are the kind of measures one must take when confronting a Kenyan Marxist menace of unprecedented nefariousness and brutality:
Pennsylvania Republicans, who won the governorship and full majority control of the legislature in 2010, are now setting their sites on a major change — to the state’s Electoral College votes, which have been regularly won statewide by Democrats for 20 years, in the winner-take-all system used by nearly all the states.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that Gov. Tom Corbett and state Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi are proposing that the state divide up its Electoral College votes according to which candidates carried each Congressional district, plus two votes for the statewide winner. The system is used by Maine — which, despite the system, has never actually split its four electoral votes — and by Nebraska, which gave one of its five votes to Barack Obama in 2008.
Pennsylvania, however, will have 20 electoral votes in the 2012 election. What’s more, the measure would give even greater meaning to the state’s redistricting for the House of Representatives, giving it a powerful effect over the presidency in addition to the House. […]
Had this proposed system been in place in 2008, when Obama won the state by a ten-point margin, he in fact would have only taken 11 out of the state’s 21 electoral votes at the time — due to a combination of past Republican-led redistricting efforts to maximize their district strength, and Obama’s votes being especially concentrated within urban areas.
While I don’t live in Pennsylvania anymore, I still consider it my home state, having spent my entire post-grade school years there until going to college. With that moderate level of insight, I feel comfortable telling you all to rest assured: there’s no other way to interpret this move than as brazenly partisan.
Just as New York would be a very different state, electorally, if all of the voters in the five boroughs only counted a handful of votes towards the electoral college, if the influence of voters in Philadelphia to the east and Pittsburgh to the west is suddenly so greatly reduced, then the large, under-populated swathe of Pennsylvania that resides in-between (often known as either Pennsylbama or Pennsyltucky) will be the clear beneficiary.
This is zero-sum.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
