Republicans' New Plan To Rig 2016 Electoral College
Credit: ThinkProgress
November 19, 2014

As usual, if they can't win outright, they'll just cheat with tactics like voter suppression, outright disenfranchisement, and more. The "more" also means resurrecting the zombie electoral college apportionment that would randomly add electors to Republican candidates in a losing state while not giving Democrats any in states they lose.

Michigan appears to be the testing ground.

Right now, nearly every state allocates 100 percent of its electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote in the state as a whole. Lund’s proposal would change that calculation in the blue state of Michigan, however, while continuing to award each red state’s full slate of electoral votes to the Republican candidate for president. If this plan had been in effect in 2012, for example, Mitt Romney would have won a quarter of Michigan’s electoral votes despite losing the state to President Obama by nearly 10 points:

This plan is supposedly "less extreme" than the one introduced in Pennsylvania in 2012.

Lund’s election-rigging plan, by contrast, seems designed to allay this concern from Republican incumbent lawmakers. Under Lund’s proposal, “Michigan would award at least 9 of its 16 electoral college votes to the winner of the popular vote in the presidential election. The top candidate would receive additional electoral votes based on how much they beat the second-place finisher by in one-on-one vote totals. Each 1.5 points above 50 percent would mean another electoral vote. Remaining electoral votes would go to the runner up. A candidate who finishes third or lower would not receive any.” Thus, while this proposal would shift fewer blue votes to the red column than the Corbett/Pileggi plan, it also does not give Democrats added incentive to move presidential campaign resources into GOP-controlled House districts. Republican presidential candidates are happy because they get free electoral votes in a state that they lost, while Republican members of Congress are happy because they can run their races relatively unmolested by a presidential campaign.

And they say we're the ones who like getting something for nothing.

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