Via Think Progress
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Rachel Maddow:
So we started with six possible states where Republicans hoped to tilt the playing field, right? Florida, Virginia, Wisconsin, Ohio, and then finally Michigan all said no. They're not gonna do it. But there is still one holdout-- not Michigan, I am surprised to say, I thought the holdout would be Michigan. But it turns out the holdout is Pennsylvania. The Republican Senate majority leader said he will introduce a bill this month, in February, even if it makes some folks in his party a little queasy. I've been thinking that Michigan was home to the do-not-give-a-bleep honey badgers of the Republican party in 2013. But maybe it is Pennsylvania, maybe it is actually Tom Corbett eating the cobra. Stay tuned.
I've been writing about the Republican election-rigging schemes a lot lately. To recap:
WaPo: Republicans in Virginia and a handful of other battleground states are pushing for far-reaching changes to the electoral college in an attempt to counter recent success by Democrats.
In the vast majority of states, the presidential candidate who wins receives all of that state’s electoral votes. The proposed changes would instead apportion electoral votes by congressional district, a setup far more favorable to Republicans. Under such a system in Virginia, for instance, President Obama would have claimed four of the state’s 13 electoral votes in the 2012 election, rather than all of them.
Again, the GOP knows the only way they can win is to lie, cheat, and steal elections, because America sure isn’t buying into their policy ideas. To make matters worse, Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus supports these tactics.
The good news is, it's being reported that Paul Ryan has nixed any changes in Wisconsin, and several states have expressed their reluctance to go along with these schemes. At least for now. At least in their present form. This could change.
The bad news is, as Rachel Maddow suggested, Pennsylvania isn't one of them. Republicans there do, indeed, plan to introduce a new election-rigging plan, per Think Progress:
According to the New Castle News a local paper in western Pennsylvania, Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R) will introduce legislation this month that will effectively give away a large chuck of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes to the Republican presidential candidate, regardless of who wins the state as a whole.
Unlike the plan Priebus backs, the New Republican Plan would not tie electoral votes to congressional districts. Instead, it would award the overwhelming majority of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes proportionally according to the popular vote, with two additional electoral votes going to the winner of the state as a whole. If the New Republican Plan had been in effect in 2012, Mitt Romney would have received 8 of Pennsylvania’ 20 electoral votes, despite losing the state by a substantial margin... The plan gives away Democratic votes to the Republican for free, while letting the Republican candidate keep all the votes they earn legitimately in other states [...]
The New Republican Plan, by contrast seems designed to allay this fear among Republican U.S. Representatives by keeping the presidential race entirely separate from congressional districts — thus allowing Republicans to steal away Democratic electoral votes without risking Republican U.S. House seats.
Here is the entire Rachel Maddow segment:
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The post If you can't win, cheat: Pennsylvania GOP to introduce election-rigging legislation appeared first on The Political Carnival.