The problem with the OP is there are so many issues at stake it is hard to pick one and focus on that.
Voter ID vs Voter fraud
Not having to prove citizenship to register
Flawed voting system from the debacle of black-box electronic voting to inaccurate readers to the myriad of ways “voter intention” is interpreted
Polling place issues especially as they get slammed after work.
Addressing the OP directly, there is more than the simple view he takes
There are 2 extra electoral votes. How would you handle that? The current way is the winner gets both but is that fair if you get 48.9% of the vote and I get 48.5%?
There is legally mandated gerrymandering that changes the whole Dem/Pub makeup as well
Why has this never been an issue in Nebraska or Maine?
It was an issue in Nebraska. In 2008, Obama won Nebraska’s Second District by 1%, thereby taking one of the state’s electoral votes. The Republican reaction? Redraw the districts to make the Second redder.
Arithmetic. Nebraska with its 5 votes could go 5-0, 4-1, or conceivably 3-2. Maine with its 4 votes can go 4-0 or 3-1. It just isn’t as significant as Pennsylvania would be if it adopted the same system, particularly if the overall loser in the state wound up with the lion’s share of electors. Sure, Nebraska’s system could matter in a razor-thin election. But the Republican plan is to steal all the elections and make it mathematically impossible for a Democrat to win. Of course, to some the chorus will be “But it’s leeeeeeeeeeegal. That’s all that matters!”
It wasn’t aimed at you. There are things that can be done. I’ll be writing to the Michigan Democratic Party to ask them to push a referendum for a constitutional amendment to prevent the legislature from splitting electors.
Unfortunately, the Dems can’t reciprocate. Are there any red states with blue statehouses? I don’t think so.
That works well enough for almost any other law. But what should the party out of power do if the party in power has used the immoral law to guarantee that they remain the party in power? In that case, the party out of power would not have the capability to change the law.
And really this is only an issue due to the somewhat unusual 2010 election, where Republicans gained control of the state governments of states that are ostensibly Democratic leaning, and then were able to redistrict to solidify their control of these states. Typically the Democrats could threaten to do the same sort of thing in Republican leaning states (such as Texas), but there aren’t any good candidates for retaliation at the moment. Well, maybe West Virginia, I guess.
Well, the problem is this: If the Conservative Movement via the GOP is able to control statehouses regardless of losing the popular vote (and they already are), then there isn’t a way to Democrats to fight back against this. The GOP will stack the deck to keep power, and use that power to keep changing the rules, and so on. Probably until they decide they want to lose or until enough of their base give up on them.
ETA: Let me rephrase: There isn’t an easy way that will work in every state. Some states can use referenda to try to override the gerrymandered “majority” party. Other states may end up with one-party minority rule for decades (which is not really unprecedented).
How did they do that? If the Democrats had a majority why did they let the Republicans redraw congressional districts so a Republican minority could win elections? If the Republican minority was able to take power from the Democratic majority, why can’t the Democratic majority take power back?
Apparently the Republican minority was making plans and working hard while the Democratic majority got complacent. Well now the Democrats need to wake up and start making plans and doing some work of their own. Anything the Republicans were able to accomplish with a minority of public support should be possible for the Democrats to accomplish with a majority of public support.
The Republicans were down but they figured out a way to outflank the Democrats. So now the Democrats are down - and that means they need to figure out a way to get back on top. They need to think like the Republicans did - how do we put ourselves back up there? - not spend their time sitting around, waiting for the Republicans to get tired of being on top.
This isn’t the whole answer, but the world isn’t static. Thanks to computers, better data, better data mining, etc., gerrymandering is much easier to do today than it was even 10 years ago. But more importantly, timing is everything. To achieve this kind of result, you need a confluence of a wave election and a redistricting year, which obviously doesn’t happen often.
Why do you need both? Well, the redistricting part is obvious, but the wave election is useful, too, as the prevailing political winds can swamp other considerations. As Martin Hyde pointed out, Democrats did win the House in 2006 and 2008, two consecutive wave elections. But that’s because they were on their way to winning the aggregate House vote by 8 or 9 points in both years. (Note that in the Republican waves of 1994 and 2010, the majority party won the aggregate House vote by less than 7%) Gerrymandering can swing a handful of districts, but not enough to reverse that kind of margin. And, of course, the same kind of thing can happen in state legislatures, too.
So you get a wave election, which overrides any attempts by the other party to keep you out of power. If you get lucky that your wave coincides with redistricting, you can entrench your newfound power. Sure, in a Democratic wave year, none of this will matter, but in years when the House vote is close (such as last year), it matters a great deal. And Democrats won’t even get an opportunity to undo things until 2020.
Given the Republican Party’s head long surge towards becoming as popular as seeping sores, the next election may not be so much a wave as a puke.
Now, we have, as a nation, long tolerated gerrymandering, more as a wink and a nod gentlemen’s agreement amongst incumbents to stay that way. Not the pristine purity I might hope for, but at least its is more or less centered around the voter’s power.
If their efforts were intended to bring the power sharing situation more in line with the actual expressed will of the people, that’s one thing. Can’t think of a reason why I could oppose that.
But to manipulate how things are counted like this goes way beyond the genteel limits of ordinary gerrymandering, this goes past political skullduggery into political skullfuckery.
Its not that unlikely that the Pubbies are writing a suicide note. The Tea Party has demonstrated the amazing power of sheer enthusiasm, but they forgot to patent it. And there’s a fuck of a lot more of us that there are of them. Plus, the people who will stand with us for the present emergency because they respect fairness, if not us.
Should this come to pass, I hope to be counseling wisdom and mercy among my lefty comrades. Lets not take this payback thing too far, with malice towards none, now that their rotten little scheme has failed, let us welcome them back into the fold…
This would mean that I have become a much better person, so I look forward to that.
I’m not talking about the specifics of gerrymandering - that horse has already left the barn and the Democrats are going to be playing catch-up at best. I’m talking about the bigger mindset here.
The census was conducted in 2010. To be in power in 2010 to take advantage of it, the Republicans had to make their plans before the 2008 elections. And the fruition of this plan will supposedly come in the 2016 election. So somebody in the Republican was already planning ways to manipulate the outcome of the 2016 election back around 2007.
Do you think when George Bush nominated Clarence Thomas as a judge in 1990, he was thinking “In ten years, that guy will be on the Supreme Court to vote my son into the White House”? No. But he was thinking about nominating young conservative lawyers to judicial seats so they could later be nominated to positions on the Supreme Court so that they could then be relied on to advance the conservative cause from the bench. Somebody was thinking that there would come a time when Republicans wouldn’t have Congress or the Presidency - so they needed to start working now so they would eventually have a majority on the Supreme Court to vote down the Democrats.
This is the reality of modern politics. The Republicans want to win elections and hold power that way - that’s Plan A. But they’re also working on Plan B, which is how will they hold on to power if they don’t win elections. And the Democrats just get caught by surprise when Plan B bites them in the ass years later - and then they say that what happened wasn’t fair. When that doesn’t work, the Democrats start a Plan B of their own. Meanwhile the Republicans are working on Plan C and are thinking about Plan D.
The Democrats need to stop falling into this trap. The Democrats need to start making long-term plans for where they want to be in ten or twenty years. The Democrats need to watch what the Republicans are doing today and figure out where they plan on being in ten or twenty years. The Democrats need to stop thinking that they can convince the Republicans to quit doing something that’s working for them. The Democrats need to stop hoping that the Republicans will give up attacking them and start planning on how to defend themselves.
Otherwise, the Republicans are going to keep beating the Democrats.
If the Republican wins in 2010 is evidence that they’re super-geniuses with plans dating back decades, how are the Democratic wins in 2006 and 2008 not evidence that the Democrats are super-geniuses too? Truth of the matter is, sometimes one party catches a wave, and sometimes the other does, and the Republicans just lucked out that their wave happened to fall on a redistricting cycle.
Well, OK, then, same argument applies. Both parties made the effort, but the Democrats’ effort paid off in 2006 and 2008, while the Republicans’ paid off in 2010.
But my point is the Democrats win when they get the most votes. The Republicans win when they get the most votes or when they figure out a different way to win.
Wow, I disagree. Plenty of democracies (including the USA) have had systems to maintain minority power for long periods of time. Absent a shooting war, the political reins of the country could be the GOP’s to lose.
Here’s a pessimistic take, spoilered so you can skip it if you don’t want to feel defeatist.
[spoiler]The GOP have absolutely controlled some state legislatures for a long time, even where Democrats outvote them, and people just accept it. The meme is that if you want different, move to the coasts.
They are immune to being turned out. They know how to mobilize voters to stop Democrats in power, and to stop Democrats from ever doing anything about GOP power. The GOP have weathered the Bush-era loss of all fiscal credibility, and they continue to run state governments without effective opposition. Even the New York legislature effectively has an GOP majority now, due to five Blue Dogs caucusing with them.
They are the future, and they know it. Demographics? White Anglos can breed easily enough, that’s how the West was won; what are all those Mormons, Santorum Catholics, and Quiverfull evangelicals for? And they figure (reasonably enough) that the more Latinos there are, the more Anglos will vote for a white party.
And to put them over the edge, there are always ways to deny the vote to The Wrong Kind of People.
They can hold on until the land burns and the sea boils.
Now, they have been countered before; there were activist courts fighting for equality and reform 50 years ago, and maybe you think there will be again. But remember, the activist courts served the right wing before FDR, and they can again. The Conservative Movement is ready for liberal judicial activism now; that counter will be countered.
Also, they fight like hell for control of schools, and they use private sector propaganda to great effect. They’re not going to lose, no matter how much they have to cheat, until something changes. They’ll lose eventually, but it’ll be ugly getting there.[/spoiler]
And you shouldn’t feel defeatist, but you shouldn’t be complacent either. The GOP really do benefit from their base’s feeling that they are regular decent people fighting a holy war against a great enemy. Countering that energy takes something more than saying, “Hey, times are changing.”