Republicans Are Planning to Rig the Vote for President

The Republicans apparently believe that their conservative agenda is so politically and morally necessary that they must achieve it by any means necessary, even cheating. The basic narrative of our democratic republic is that "We, the people…" are self-governing. The redistricting, and other tactics such as voter suppression used in a recent Republican campaigns, undermine the self-governance principle and constitute cheating. Moreover, worse is yet to come. They want to rig the presidential election.

Gerrymandering is an ancient and dishonorable art. The Republicans now want to extend it from the legislature to the presidential level. They see redistricting, along with changes in the electoral college, as the means to take and hold the presidency even if they lose the popular vote. Electors would be awarded according to the presidential winner in each gerrymandered congressional district rather than winner-take-all. Had this proposal been in effect in 2012, Romney would have been elected president even though Obama won the popular vote by more than 5%.

Republican popular vote losses in the recent election stunned the leadership and they are running scared. Speaker of the House John Boehner fears that Obama's goal is to "annihilate the Republican Party" and shove it "into the dustbin of history." The rhetoric may be overblown bu tit rings with real fear.

If you look at the data and forces at work in the short run, things don't look all that bad. The Republicans still control the House of Representatives with a solid majority. They hold both houses of the legislature in 28 states and they hold 30 governorships. That doesn't look like a party about to get swept away.

That appearance is deceiving. Speaker of the House John Boehner and RNC Chairman Reince Priebus are good enough politicians to know that the party is in trouble.

To understand the problem facing the Republicans, we have to look at the way geography and demographics are threatening them and how they have been playing the political game. The geography of Republican politics recognizes that their power is anchored in the old Confederacy with an affiliated party in the rural Plains states. The real contest occurs in the border, mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states. Republicans are not a political force in the East or West coastal states. That geography offers the Republicans very little in the way of urban population centers or hope for an expanding base.

The demographics are as desperate: the old white guys who have become a symbol of the Republican Party are dying out while minorities, women and young people of color are a growing force in numbers and in Democratic allegiance.

The Republican leadership recognizes the demographic problem and the limits of their Southern Strategy. To stave off the seeming inevitable, they instituted a program of voter suppression. Voter rolls were purged of the Hispanic, black and other hyphenated American voters who might be expected to vote Democratic.

Disinformation campaigns misled voters about the time and place of polling and eligibility to vote. Other techniques included phone jamming, the reduction of hours the polls were open and other voting malpractice that might suppress Democratic votes. Since 2009, 30 Republican state governments have instituted photo ID requirements to vote. The intent is to make voting difficult and discourage voting by the old and the poor who were more likely to be Democrats and less likely to have photo ID. It was cynically assigned to nonexistent voter fraud.

Voter suppression was widespread but not very successful. It is a form of cheating in that it is intended to deny people their rights as citizens. The Republicans had to find something else but they had proven tolerant of a high level of hypocrisy.

Redistricting, with gerrymandering, looks like just the trick. It had already been very successful, especially in the House of Representatives. The Republicans won a majority in the House only because of exquisite gerrymandering in the redistricting that followed the 2010 census. Democrats received 1.1 million more congressional votes than the Republicans but won 33 less seats.

In Pennsylvania, for instance, the Republicans "won" 13 of 18 U.S. House seats even though they received less than 50% of the total votes for House candidates.

The outcome in our democratic republic should reflect the choice of the electorate. Using redistricting in this fashion subverts that goal and will still only postpone self-annihilation. It is in fact cheating. Politicians who campaign to win at any cost are corrupt.

They tell me Haley Barbour and some other leading Republicans have rejected this plan. If they are quite willing to use it to rig the vote for control of the US House of Representatives, what makes you think they will not use it for the presidency?