The GOP is already plotting how to marginalize urban voters in the next election

[DonViejo]

Choose Your Own Voters

The GOP is already plotting how to marginalize urban voters in the next election.

By David Weigel

Posted Tuesday, Dec 11, 2012, at 11:52 PM ET

In the busy mind of Virginia state Sen. Charles Carrico, voters can be divided into two species. The first: “people in my district,” which covers a swath of the state’s rural southwest. These voters are real people. The second species: voters in “metropolitan districts.” In 2012 and 2008, rural voters watched Democrats turn out that metro vote, which elected Barack Obama. That experience apparently taught Carrico and the people he represents that “their votes don’t mean anything.”

Carrico’s solution: Make the rural vote matter more and make the metro vote count less. His bill, SB273, would assign 11 of Virginia’s electoral votes to its 11 congressional districts. The state’s two remaining votes would go to whoever received the “highest number of votes in a majority of congressional districts.”

Four of those 11 districts contain huge clusters of Democrats, and voted for Obama. The next seven districts, largely rural, voted for Mitt Romney. Had the Carrico proposal gone into effect this year, Romney would have lost Virginia’s popular vote by 4 points and carried nine of its 13 electors. The metro denizen’s vote would have still meant something, sure. It would have meant less than the vote of the angry coal miner in Appalachia.

When I heard about the Carrico proposal and called around, Democrats shrugged. Virginia Republicans control both houses of the Legislature, but they control the Senate only narrowly. Virginia voted Republican for 44 years until Barack Obama came along. Why would ...

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[ladjf]

1. The GOP spends all of its energy trying to cheat on the elections rather than attempting to

govern well. nt

[MyshkinCommaPrince]

2. Govern well?

Not to quibble. But I'm not convinced that there's any recent evidence - in decades, perhaps - to support the idea that Repugs want to govern well, by any standards that we would accept. They actually seem to want to un-govern. They want to get the jobs so they can deliberately not do them. Possibly I just haven't been looking at instances where they behave to the good of the public and the country as a whole.

[Cha]

3. Of course they are. They are a mortal enemy to our County..

they need to be treated as such.

[JoSpits]

4. Spam deleted by SidDithers (MIR Team)

[Dawson Leery]

5. The old south was not dealt with.

[ROBROX]

6. THIS IS AN OLD GOP IDEA TO WIN

Every year some state comes up with dividing their election results to give the LOSER a share. In this case it would turn around the election result so the LOSER wins. Then the spin would be reproduced in other states so the LOSERS can win.

The LOSERS will try anything and everything to WIN on for the gypper.

[SpartanDem]

7. They'd rather cheat than face internal policy debates

broadening their appeal beyond their old, white people means nasty fights over stances on things like immigration or same sex marriage.

[ode2joi]

9. GOP

They cannot change. It is in their DNA. The party would be torn asunder if they really revamped themselves. Their foundation is built on sand. The hate for the "other" is just too profound.

[Cresent City Kid]

8. Whatever your policies are..

there's something wrong with them if your election strategy is to reduce the number of people who vote or come up with schemes to make some votes have an unequal weight in the results.

[RomneyLies]

10. The Federalists pulled this sort of shit after the disastrous elections of 1804 & 1808.

They tried to rig the outcome in the electoral college through back room dealings after that.

It failed, miserably.

The Federalist Party was dead by 1829.

[Voltaire]

11. The point of all this is

what are we going to do about this. We. All of us. We. The GOP never sleeps when it comes to cheating. We cannot wait, not a minute to keep a light on this and to let those bastards know that we are on to their bullshit and we are not about to let it happen.