Award electoral votes by Congressional district?

Local, National, Politics, Virginia 1 Minute

That’s the plan being proposed by Republicans in California.

During the 2004 election, President Bush was handily defeated in California but carried 22 of the state’s districts. If the proposed change had been in effect then, he would have been awarded 22 of the state’s electoral votes with Democrat John Kerry winning the rest.

So how would it look if Virginia did something similar? Virginia has 13 electoral votes. If 2 were allocated to the winner, as in the California proposal, and the remainder allocated by CD, Kerry would have picked up two electoral votes, since he won two CDs.

Obviously, those two wouldn’t have been enough to put him over. Nevertheless, the effect would be move closer to the popular vote as the mechanism for determining the president.

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23 thoughts on “Award electoral votes by Congressional district?”

  1. Brian (not the idiot one): we’d want to do that because relying on the goodwill of Electors to uphold the widely held illusion of popular direct election is a pretty bad idea.

    ~

    Brian, it’s people like you who would stand in the way of an intelligent conversation.

  3. If people are truly concerned about “true” equal share of representation maybe they ought to be ooking at the make ups of this Congress various committees. Been spending the weekend on Long Island and reading the papers was peeved to learn New York has FOUR Congressman on one committee, ie Appropriations. Regardless of party thats just plane offensvie and people should be outraged that one State could have so many members influencing something like Appropriations. Thats huge. Great for New York but where does that leave the rest of us?

  4. Pingback: GOP Proposes To Change Electoral College Awarding In California » The Moderate Voice

  5. I disagree wholeheartedly with your final analysis that awarding EVs by Congressional District will move the Electoral College towards a closer refection of the popular vote, Vivian. It will instead only give states more incentive to continue partisan gerrymandering. Note that in Virginia in 2006, if a Presidential Election had been held that year, Virginia was in play at a statewide level because of heavy turnout in the dense regions of Northern VA for Jim Webb. In that instance, because democrats picked up more votes statewide than republicans, the popular statewide-vote would have resulted in all of Virginia’s electoral votes being awarded to the Democrat.

    Under the proposed California plan, on the other hand, Democrats probably wouldn’t have won even a majority of the electoral votes from the state thanks to some pretty clever gerrymandering. Yet the statewide popular vote favored Dems by a narrow margin.

    How does that reflect an stronger role for popular vote in Presidential Selection, pray tell?

  6. Without political considerations, of course 🙂

    From purely the perspective of the fact the voters of each Congressional district would have a say, the allocation would reflect the opinion of the voters in that CD.

    Of course, once you put the politics into it, then the picture changes. For the very same reason that the Rs in CA are pressing for this, the Ds would resist it. And whose voice really gets lost? The voters.

    Our winner-take-all system has resulted in a couple of times where the winner of the popular vote lost the election due to the allocation of EVs. I’d really rather see a move to the popular vote as the mechanism. And this would start down that path.

    Other pieces, of course, is that the gerrymandering of districts would have to stop. And we are making progress in that area, as more states move towards non-partisan, independent redistricting commissions.

  7. You’re making no sense, anonymous. Your assertion is that a 51% majority winning all 13 of VA’s electoral votes is a “stronger role for the popular” vote than 49% winning 7 of 13 electoral votes because of “gerrymandering.”

    Actually, Webb got 49.6%, Allen 49.2%, Green 1.1%, and write-ins 0.1%. Similarly, presidential candidates often “win” a state without actually getting a majority of the votes in that state, as Bush did in Florida in 2000.

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