Pennsylvania: Republicans look to alter state’s electoral vote system | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

One year after requiring voters to show photo identification, state Republican leaders are set in 2013 to consider changing Pennsylvania’s nearly two-century-old method of awarding its presidential votes. As with voter ID, the proposal is being met with howls of protest from Democrats. Like 48 other states, Pennsylvania uses a winner-take-all system with its electoral votes: when Barack Obama won 52 percent of the state’s vote on Nov. 6 to Mitt Romney’s 47 percent, he bagged all 20 of them. A measure from state Sen. Dominic Pileggi, R-Delaware County, would instead award 18 of them according to the popular vote breakdown and give two others to the state’s overall winner.

Wisconsin: Walker open to changing state’s Electoral College allocations | Journal Sentinel

Gov. Scott Walker is open to having Wisconsin allocate its Electoral College votes based on results from each congressional district – a move that would offer Republicans a chance to score at least a partial victory in a state that has gone Democratic in the last seven presidential elections. The idea is being considered in other battleground states that have tipped toward Democrats as Republicans try to develop a national plan to capture the presidency in future years. The GOP governor said he found the notion intriguing but neither embraced it nor rejected it. “To me, it’s an interesting concept, it’s a plausible concept, but it’s not one where I’m convinced either of its merits or lack thereof,” he said in a recent interview at the governor’s mansion in Maple Bluff. Democrats promised to fight such a change, saying they viewed it as a way for Republicans to try to rig elections to their advantage.

Pennsylvania: House Republicans Resurrect Congressional-Based Electoral College Plan | PoliticsPA

State Reps. Robert Godshall (R-Montco) and Seth Grove (R-York) want Pennsylvania to divvy ups its electoral college votes by congressional district. It’s a plan originally pitched by Sen. Dominic Pileggi in 2011 and would have nullified President Obama’s Pa. advantage had it been in effect in 2012. In their co-sponsorship memo, they essentially concede that Pa. is no longer a competitive presidential state. “I believe that the Congressional District Method will increase voter turnout and encourage candidates to campaign in all states rather than just those that are competitive,” the two wrote. “Most importantly, this method of selecting presidential electors will give a stronger voice to voters in all regions of our great Commonwealth.” Read: Republicans are tired of voting for candidates who don’t win Pa.

National: Obama wins Electoral College vote; Republicans seek changes in state rules | Boston Herald

Despite predictions that the presidential election could end in an electoral vote tie, or that the winner of the popular vote could again be denied the White House by the Electoral College, President Barack Obama won his anticipated 126-vote landslide Monday as the 538 electors officially voted in statehouses. But 12 years after Al Gore’s defeat prompted some Democrats to call for changing to the constitutionally prescribed method of choosing the president, Republicans are now mounting efforts in key states to end the winner-take-all method that most states employ. Some Republican strategists believe that could counter the advantage Democrats have gained on the path to the needed 270 electoral votes.

National: Electoral College vote affirms Obama re-election | US News and World Report

Tradition trumped suspense Monday as members of the Electoral College cast the official, final votes in the 2012 presidential election, a constitutional formality on President Barack Obama’s march to a second term. The rite playing in state capitols involved party luminaries and tireless activists carrying out the will of each state’s voters. The popular vote from state-to-state dictates whether Democratic or Republican electors get the honor, but the outcome wasn’t in doubt. Obama had well more than the 270 votes required to win the White House. Obama was on course to get 332 votes to Republican Mitt Romney’s 206, barring defectors known as “faithless electors.” California’s 55 electoral votes — the largest cache in any state — helped put the Democratic president over the top by late Monday afternoon. Electors also were affirming Joe Biden for another term as vice president. “Everybody votes for president, but nobody gets a real vote except a presidential elector,” said elector Mike Bohan of Oregon, which was in Obama’s column.

Minnesota: Bipartisan bunch pushes National Popular Vote | StarTribune.com

On the same day Minnesota’s presidential electors will ceremonially cast their votes for President Barack Obama, a bipartisan bunch of Minnesota lawmakers proposed exchanging the power of the Electoral College and making the national popular vote supreme. The new system, backed by a diverse group of legislators, would give weight to the number of actual votes presidential candidates get, rather than just number of Electoral College votes, in presidential elections. A diverse group of Minnesota backers say it would  mean every vote would have equal value during presidential campaigns, removing the candidates’ incentive to focus primarily on the handful swing states. “Everyone understands that places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, swing states, this is a really good process for them right now. Unfortunately, the rest of the country gets hosed,” backer Rep. Pat Garofalo, R-Farmington, said Monday.

Michigan: Republican Spokesman: Splitting Up Electoral College Votes Would Prevent Detroit Voters From “Distorting” Results | Slate

In the last few weeks, a small number of Republican legislators — all in states that voted for Barack Obama — have talked about splitting up their electoral votes. When I wrote about this, I got a few comments along the lines of “hey, is this a trend, or are you scaremongering?” No. It’s a trend. Reid Wilson reports that Wisconsin, along with Michigan and Pennsylvania, is home to Republicans who might press their gerrymandered legislative advantage to assign electoral votes by gerrymandered congressional districts. “If you did the calculation, you’d see a massive shift of electoral votes in states that are blue and fully [in] red control,” said one senior Republican taking an active role in pushing the proposal. “There’s no kind of autopsy and outreach that can grab us those electoral votes that quickly.”

National: The GOP’s Electoral College Scheme | NationalJournal.com

Republicans alarmed at the apparent challenges they face in winning the White House are preparing an all-out assault on the Electoral College system in critical states, an initiative that would significantly ease the party’s path to the Oval Office. Senior Republicans say they will try to leverage their party’s majorities in Democratic-leaning states in an effort to end the winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes. Instead, bills that will be introduced in several Democratic states would award electoral votes on a proportional basis. Already, two states — Maine and Nebraska — award an electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district. The candidate who wins the most votes statewide takes the final two at-large electoral votes. Only once, when President Obama won a congressional district based in Omaha in 2008, has either of those states actually split their vote. But if more reliably blue states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were to award their electoral votes proportionally, Republicans would be able to eat into what has become a deep Democratic advantage.

Voting Blogs: Numbers Show Ohio at Unique Risk of Disputed Presidential Votes | ElectionLaw@Moritz

Today, December 17, is the date the presidential electors of each state meet to cast their official votes for president. No drama surrounds the event this year, because there have been no vote-counting disputes between November 6 and now that could affect the outcome of the presidential election. To invoke a phrase that has become familiar, the margin of victory was comfortably beyond the margin of litigation. But, as 2000 showed, it may not always be so, and some numbers from this year’s election indicate that, of all the presidential swing states, Ohio is the most vulnerable to a ballot-counting dispute that would delay determining the Electoral College winner. As will be detailed below, the swing states fall into three categories in terms of their level of risk–low, medium, or high–with respect to a disputed presidential election.  Ohio stands alone in having the highest risk.

National: Electoral college set to vote on President Obama’s reelection | The Washington Post

President Obama hasn’t officially secured a second term in the White House. Technically, that won’t happen until the electoral college casts its ballots Monday — presumably in favor of the winner for each state. Even then, Congress has to formally declare Obama the victor after counting the electoral votes on Jan. 6. Such is the nature of an often poorly understood — and some argue arcane — system for electing the U.S. president. Essentially, Nov. 6 marked the beginning, not the end, of the process for this cycle. No one is expecting anything but a routine process Monday for Obama, who decisively won the popular vote last month, earning 332 pledged electoral votes to Mitt Romney’s 206. There have been some electoral defectors in the past, but they’ve been rare.

Virginia: How the Republican Party is planning to marginalize urban voters in the next election | Slate Magazine

In the busy mind of Virginia state Sen. Charles Carrico, voters can be divided into two species. The first: “people in my district,” which covers a swath of the state’s rural southwest. These voters are real people. The second species: voters in “metropolitan districts.” In 2012 and 2008, rural voters watched Democrats turn out that metro vote, which elected Barack Obama. That experience apparently taught Carrico and the people he represents that “their votes don’t mean anything.” Carrico’s solution: Make the rural vote matter more and make the metro vote count less. His bill, SB273, would assign 11 of Virginia’s electoral votes to its 11 congressional districts. The state’s two remaining votes would go to whoever received the “highest number of votes in a majority of congressional districts.”

Voting Blogs: Pennsylvania Senate Leader Pileggi Wrong on Prescription for Electoral College Reform | FairVote

Hot off the presses from Bloomberg News is a major Electoral College development. Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi has circulated a letter to his legislative colleagues seeking support for a bill to replace the winner-take-all allocation of his state’s Electoral College votes with one based on proportional representation – with two electoral votes going to the winner of the state and 18 votes allocated proportionally. The proposal is sure to trigger an intense partisan reaction. Pennsylvania Republicans often come close in  presidential elections, but last won an electoral vote in 1988 when George Bush defeated Michael Dukakis. Yet if Sen. Pileggi’s plan had been in place this year, President Barack Obama’s 5.4% win in the statewide popular vote would have translated into his earning 12 electoral votes rather than 20, while Gov. Mitt Romney  would have won eight electoral votes rather than zero. Shifting eight electoral votes in Pennsylvania would have provided a bigger boost to Romney than switching the outcome in Iowa.

Pennsylvania: Legislative Step May Help Republicans Win Electoral Vote | Bloomberg

A Pennsylvania lawmaker’s plan to divvy up electoral votes based on a presidential candidate’s public support may be just the first of many state legislative moves to alter the way the nation chooses a leader. State Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi, a Republican from Chester, wants to replace the winner-take-all system, which gave President Barack Obama Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes, with one that divides them to reflect the proportion of public support for each candidate. His method would have given 12 votes to Obama and eight to Republican Mitt Romney this year.

Ohio: Husted soothes Electoral College tempest – Says his comments ‘badly taken out of context’ | Cincinnati.com

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted on Wednesday disputed online reports that he was proposing a dramatic overhaul of how Ohio conducts presidential elections, saying he does not favor scrapping the Electoral College’s winner-take-all format in favor of awarding electoral votes by congressional districts. Husted, who frequently found himself engulfed in controversy throughout the presidential race, sought to extinguish another nascent political fire started by reports in recent days that he had called for division of electoral votes by congressional district in future years.

National: OSCE slams US elections | Voice of Russia

Observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) have expressed dissatisfaction with the organization of the presidential elections in the United States. Russia’s representatives of the OSCE mission are yet to speak to journalists on the matter, while their European colleagues have already issued an official report on the US elections. US media continue to hush up the report, instead focusing on the re-election of Barack Obama. One even gets the impression that US media outlets were irked with the OSCE observers’ work in the US during the elections. All this is not uncommon during elections worldwide, says Maxim Minayev of the Center for Political Conjuncture in Moscow.

Editorials: National Popular Vote: The Recount Bugaboo | Hendrik Hertzberg/The New Yorker

I was on MSNBC’s “Up With Chris Hayes” yesterday doing my Ancient Mariner harangue in favor of the National Popular Vote, along with Yale’s Akhil Reed Amar, one of the intellectual fathers of that ingenious plan, which would allow us to elect our Presidents the same way we elect governors and senators and everybody else, i.e., the candidate with the most votes wins—and would do it without messing with the Constitution. You can watch the relevant three segments. (One follows another, with unavoidable commercials.) Akhil and I managed to squeeze in most of our arguments, but right at the end Chris brought up a question we didn’t have time to fully answer: What about recounts? What if Florida 2000 were reproduced on a national scale?

National: Campaign lawyers gear up for nail-biter election | Deutsche Welle

The dead heat in the presidential race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney brings back memories of the controversial 2000 election. But unlike 12 years ago, this time everyone is prepared to engage in legal battle. If the history of the 2000 presidential contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore is any indication of this year’s election, we could be heading toward a political cliffhanger. That’s because at this point – a week before election day on November 6 – the race between Obama and Romney might even be closer than that of 2000 between Bush and Gore. According to Real Clear Politics’ national average, a sort of aggregated poll of most national surveys, Romney currently leads Obama by less than one percent point – a virtual tie. Back in 2000, at the same time, most national polls had Bush in front by several points.

National: An Electoral Tie Could Bind the Senate | Roll Call

One of Washington’s favorite parlor games is conjecturing about the remote possibility of an Electoral College tie. Prognosticators have come up with various maps and scenarios under which the election would result in a 269-269 deadlock, which would vest the responsibility of choosing the country’s leaders squarely in what polls say is one of the least popular institutions in the country — Congress. There’s little dispute about what would happen in the main event. Next year’s House would choose the president, with each state delegation casting one vote.

National: Presidential election 2012: Lawyers gird for possible recounts | POLITICO.com

As the frenzied race for the White House comes down to the wire, tens of thousands of partisan lawyers are mobilizing under the radar in battleground states, all steeling for one terrifying scenario: a recount that could decide the presidency. Their objective is to head off a repeat of the Gore-Bush fiasco 12 years ago in which Al Gore won the popular vote and George W. Bush captured the Electoral College and ultimately the presidency.“They are all bracing for Florida in 2000 — everyone wants to be in position so as not to be disadvantaged by a court decision in a tie,” says Steve Schmidt, who ran John McCain’s 2008 campaign. “This [is] a preventive strategy. They are largely in search of problems that don’t yet exist. It’s like the Cold War and nuclear capability. You want to have what the other guy has. ”

Editorials: Why have an electoral college? | latimes.com

The electoral college is one of the most controversial and ridiculed parts of the Constitution. It is not just for the obvious reasons — the “wrong winner” elections of 1876, 1888 and 2000. The college has also focused the nation’s attention on a few swing states, allowing candidates to ignore a large percentage of the voters in their campaign. Today, the three largest states get little attention, except as ATMs for campaign fundraising.

National: Nightmare election scenarios worry both parties | Huffington Post

Here in a county that knows a thing or two about Election Day meltdowns, both parties are fretting over what might go seriously wrong before, during or just after the Nov. 6 presidential election. “More than 50 percent of the provisional ballots are thrown in the trash in this state,” Florida state Rep. Mark Pafford told about 80 retirees who gathered for last week’s meeting of the Golden Lakes Democratic Club. That’s only a slight exaggeration – 48 percent of the provisional ballots cast in Florida in 2008 were rejected. And Pafford’s warning underscores anxiety in Florida and other states about legal challenges, ballot problems or bizarre outcomes that could bedevil a race that seems likely to be close – conceivably as close as the 2000 contest that people still quarrel about. The mere mention of that election unsettles people in Palm Beach County. The county’s poorly designed “butterfly ballot” confused thousands of voters, arguably costing Democrat Al Gore the state, and thereby the presidency.

Editorials: End the electoral college | USA Today

Vladimir Putin had an election in Russia. This week, Hugo Chavez had one in Venezuela. Last spring, Nicholas Sarkozy lost one in France. In each case, the outcome was decided by the majority of voters in their country. Such direct democracy is a foreign concept in the USA, where we require neither direct voting nor a majority to lead our nation. The reason is an arcane institution: the Electoral College. In the U.S., presidents are not elected by the people but by 538 “electors” who award blocks of votes on a state-by-state basis. The result is that presidents can be — and have been — elected with fewer votes than their opponents. Indeed, various presidents have taken office with less than 50% of the vote. The question is whether a president should be elected by a majority of voters of at least one free country before he can call himself the leader of the free world. The Electoral College is a relic of a time when the Framers believed that average people could not be trusted with selecting a president, at least not entirely. This was consistent with a general view of the dangers of direct voting systems. Until 1913, U.S. senators were elected not by their constituents but by the state legislators. When we finally got rid of that provision with the 17th Amendment, we failed to change its sister provision in Article II on the indirect election of presidents.

Oklahoma: Court Explains Why State Officers of Americans Elect Cannot Nominate Presidential Electors | Ballot Access News

Here is the short decision of the Oklahoma State Supreme Court in Lawhorn v Ziriax, 2012 OK 78. The decision implies, but not does explicitly say, that qualified parties in Oklahoma cannot nominate presidential electors unless their party holds a national convention. This is based on an incidental part of the election law that says presidential elector candidates must take an oath to support the candidate chosen at that party’s national convention. The irony of this interpretation is that even if Americans Elect had gone ahead with its original plans, it never planned to nominate a presidential or vice-presidential candidate at a national convention. Instead, the party expected to nominate via an on-line vote of any registered voter in the nation who wished to participate.

National: 3 Electoral College members may pass on Romney | The Associated Press

At least three Republican electors say they may not support their party’s presidential ticket when the Electoral College meets in December to formally elect the next president, escalating tensions within the GOP and adding a fresh layer of intrigue to the final weeks of the White House race. The electors — all supporters of former GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul — told The Associated Press they are exploring options should Mitt Romney win their states. They expressed frustration at how Republican leaders have worked to suppress Paul’s conservative movement and his legion of loyal supporters. “They’ve never given Ron Paul a fair shot, and I’m disgusted with that. I’d like to show them how disgusted I am,” said Melinda Wadsley, an Iowa mother of three who was selected as a Republican elector earlier this year. She said Paul is the better choice and noted that the Electoral College was founded with the idea that electors wouldn’t just mimic the popular vote. The defection of multiple electors would be unprecedented in the last 116 years of U.S. politics. It also would raise the remote possibility that the country could even end up with a president and vice president from different parties.

National: Electoral College tie possible in Obama-Romney race | CNN.com

It’s the white whale of American elections: elusive, mythical and never realized. But could it finally happen this year? The likelihood that President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney will each net 269 electoral votes in November, instead of the 270 needed to win, is actually not so farfetched — and for close observers of the Electoral College system, a tie would set off a wave of constitutional and political mayhem that would make the 2000 Florida recount seem like a tidy affair. Election results in key states would immediately be subject to legal challenges. Electors, normally an anonymous batch of party insiders elected to ratify each state’s winner with their electoral votes, would be lobbied to change their votes by friends, neighbors and political leaders. Swing states could decide U.S. election Alex Castellanos’ electoral map James Carville’s electoral map Ultimately, the House of Representatives could elect the next president, even if that candidate lost the popular vote.

Voting Blogs: The Current Electoral College is Like the World Series (Which is Why We Need to Change It) | FairVote.org

Defending the current structure of the Electoral College is a difficult task. The winner-take-all method–in which states allocate all their electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate carries the state–is still used by the vast majority of states today. Its apologists, struggling to make this outdated and unfair system appealing to Americans, have tried to make it seem quintessentially American by comparing it to the most quintessentially American thing possible: baseball’s World Series. This analogy, introduced by MIT researcher Alan Natapoff in the 1990s and widely circulated after the controversial presidential election of 2000, is still commonly cited today as a defense of a winner-take-all Electoral College. It should not be. If anything, comparing these two American institutions perfectly illustrates we why we need to get rid of the winner-take-all Electoral College rules and establish a fairer system of electing the president based on a national popular vote. The basic argument goes like this. The World Series is divided into seven games. The winner of the World Series is the team that wins four out of the seven games, not the team that scores the most aggregate runs over the course of the series. Likewise, the winner of the Electoral College is the candidate that wins the majority of electoral votes through winning states, not the candidate that receives the most aggregate votes in the total population.

Voting Blogs: The constitutionality of the national popular vote: refuting challenges based on Article II, Section One | State of Elections

The National Popular Vote (NPV) plan guarantees election of the presidential candidate who earns the greatest number of votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. NPV does not dispense with the Electoral College, and is not a constitutional amendment. Rather, the plan is based on two clear powers given to the states under the Constitution: the power under Article 2 Section 1 to choose how to allocate its presidential electors, and the power under Article 1 Section 10 to enter into interstate compacts. States in early U.S. history often exercised the power to change rules for allocating electoral votes. While today, 48 states and the District of Columbia award their electoral votes to the winner of that state’s popular vote, the founders did not originally contemplate this type of system, as James Madison explained in 1823.

Nevada: Candidates for Presidential Elector in Nevada File Lawsuit to Remove “None of the Above” from November 2012 Ballot | Ballot Access News

On June 8, two Republican nominees for presidential elector from Nevada filed a federal lawsuit, asking that “None of the Above” be removed from the November 2012 ballot and future years. The case is Townley v State of Nevada, 3:12-cv-00310. Here is the 16-page complaint. Besides the elector candidates, the complaint lists nine voter plaintiffs. Starting in 1976, Nevada has printed “none of the above” on primary and general election ballots, but only for statewide office. The lawsuit argues that because a vote for “None of the above” has no legal effect, the voters who vote for “None of the above” are being harmed, because their vote has no effect. The complaint says if a victory by “None of the above” had any legal consequences, then it would be constitutional.

Voting Blogs: Why James Madison Wanted to Change the Way We Vote For President | FairVote.org

One of the most common criticisms of plans to modify or eliminate the Electoral College is that to do so would be to deviate from the wisdom of the Founders of the American political system. But the “Father of the Constitution” himself, James Madison, was never in favor of our current system for electing the president, one in which nearly all states award their electoral votes to the statewide popular vote winner. He ultimately backed a constitutional amendment to prohibit this practice. As historian Garry Wills wrote of our fourth president, “as a framer and defender of the Constitution he had no peer.” Yet, when he helped create the Constitution and when he defended it years after his presidency, Madison repeatedly argued for alternatives to the winner-take-all method of choosing a state’s presidential electors. Like other leaders of that time, he looked at the world with clear eyes and learned from experience, unafraid to support change when that change made sense.

Editorials: Are We Headed for Another Electoral Mess? | Roll Call

The 2012 presidential election looks like it could well be another squeaker, and if it is, a number of possible outcomes could produce national hand-wringing, finger-pointing, complaints of unfairness and anger, further dividing Americans and undermining confidence in our political system. A dozen years ago, Democrat Al Gore drew 540,000 votes more than Republican George W. Bush but lost the presidency when Bush carried Florida and won 271 electoral votes. There is no reason that couldn’t happen again, with President Barack Obama winning a narrow popular vote victory and losing in the Electoral College. Most of the same states are in play as were in 2000, and any close popular vote outcome raises the possibility of a split decision, especially because Obama is likely to “waste” large numbers of votes in carrying a handful of populous states. In 2000, six states delivered a plurality of at least 500,000 votes to one of the major party nominees. Five of those states — New York, California, Massachusetts, Illinois and New Jersey — went for Gore, while only one, Texas, went for Bush. Bush carried 30 states that year, while Gore won 20 states and the District of Columbia. Eight years later, in a relative blowout, 10 states delivered pluralities of at least 500,000 votes for one of the nominees. Obama won nine of those states (the five above plus Michigan, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Washington), while Texas gave Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) a huge win. McCain won only 22 states that year to Obama’s 28 (plus D.C.), though the Democrat also won one of Nebraska’s electoral votes by carrying the state’s 2nd district.