How would recent presidential election results look if all states used the Nebraska/Maine (District Method) of awarding/appointing electors? And why don’t they? It seems fairer than winner-take-all but maybe I’m not understanding it correctly.
Biggest issue is that it them makes the presidential elections subject to gerrymandering.
Also, there’s no real incentive for a state to do it unless there’s a difference between the state goverment and how the state votes in presidential elections. If it’s a Dem legislature, and the statue normally goes blue, switching to district voting would just throw more votes towards the Republican president.
According to this site, Romney would’ve won the 2012 election if votes had been allocated that way, despite losing the popular vote. So it’s not necessarily any more fair.
What I find most surprising is that Nebraska does do it, and further, their three districts are very close to what an impartial algorithm would draw (possibly exactly, if the algorithm were programmed to prefer using county lines). It wouldn’t be hard at all for them to gerrymander away any possibility of a Democrat winning in any of the districts (for instance, divide the state into horizontal stripes), and of course even easier for them to use the same winner-takes-all method of most states, but they don’t do either, with the result that Barack Obama actually won an electoral vote from the state.
Looks like the new map makes the one even district slightly redder: