GOP Candidate’s STATE-LEVEL Electoral College Idea Could Help Rural Areas

In 2019, the Democrat-controlled Colorado Senate joined a liberal-state pact designed to eliminate our nation’s Electoral College system. Now a Colorado gubernatorial candidate is, far from just mounting a defense against this, taking the offense:

It’s an idea that not only could help rural Centennial State counties, but also could virtually neutralize vote fraud’s effectiveness. The Washington Examiner reports on the story:

One candidate in Colorado’s gubernatorial election has called for eliminating its one-person, one-vote approach in favor of a state-level electoral college….

Greg Lopez, a Republican candidate for Colorado’s governor, has pitched the idea of using an electoral college-based approach for statewide political office, arguing the current system favors large cities at the expense of more rural counties.

“One of the things that I’m going to do, and I’ve already put this plan together, is, as governor, I’m going to introduce a conversation about doing away with the popular vote for statewide elected officials and doing an electoral college vote for statewide elected officials,” Lopez said in audio acquired by 9News in a report published Wednesday.

The plan would weigh a county’s votes based on the number of voters in the district in hopes of increasing turnout.

“I’ve already got the plan in place,” Lopez said. “The most that any county can get is 11 electoral college votes. The least that a county can get is three.”

As indicated above, note that Lopez’s electoral vote system differs from our national one in a significant way: According to what he states in this 9News report, a county’s electoral votes would be apportioned based on turnout.

Under this system, Republicans would’ve fared far better than they did in the 2018 election, contend observers. As Raw Story relates, “Democratic Gov. Jared Polis, who won the 2018 election by double digits, would have received 181 electoral votes to the 263 earned by his Republican opponent, Walker Stapleton. ‘Lopez’s weighting system would have given the 2,013 combined voters in Hinsdale, Kiowa and Mineral counties a total of 33 electoral votes, more than double the 14 electoral votes of Denver, Arapahoe and Adams counties’ combined 761,873 voters,’ said the [9News] report.”

Rural counties’ residents nationwide have sometimes lamented their lack of representation, as their state and national governments’ natures are often determined by their major cities. For example, New York is mostly rural, and the vast majority of its counties voted for President Trump in 2020. Yet the massive left-wing population in New York City and its environs ensures the Empire State will support the Democratic presidential contender every election and will itself be an unassailable leftist bastion. The same is true of Illinois.

Of course, Democrats don’t like Lopez’s idea, and liberal Raw Story writes that his “plan would almost certainly be unconstitutional under the Supreme Court’s landmark 1964 ruling in Reynolds v. Sims, which enforced the principle of ‘one person, one vote’ in state elections.” Yet, if true, someone ought to inform ex-federal judge Stephen Robinson.

Robinson is the judge who more than a decade ago approved a plan to give every resident of Port Chester, N.Y., six votes in village elections. The goal was to increase the chances of getting Hispanics elected in the thinking that the locality’s Latino residents would be more likely (profiling?) than others to exhibit ethnic patriotism and pool their votes.

(Also worth mentioning: In 2020, a college professor proposed that blacks’ votes be worth twice those of whites, as a form of reparations.)

What’s more, why a statewide electoral-college system mirroring our national one should be unconstitutional Raw Story did not explain.

Yet such an idea’s value extends far beyond providing greater rural representation; it also would largely neutralize vote fraud. Why?

Stealing an election, as occurred in 2020, requires manipulating the vote not only in just a handful of swing states — but merely in one or two cities/counties within each of those states.

That is to say, if you discard opposition party votes and/or manufacture your side’s ballots in, for example, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh — the former of which is a notorious vote-fraud hotbed — you can swing the whole state of Pennsylvania and capture its 20 electoral votes. The same is true of Detroit in Michigan, Milwaukee in Wisconsin, and Fulton County in Georgia: Cooking the books in those population centers will neutralize the rest of the states’ counties’ influence.

This fraud is a big-city phenomenon, too. Small populations and intimacy — everyone knowing everyone — make massive-scale rural-area vote fraud unrealistic. Consider as well that country folk are more law-abiding in general and that, corresponding to this, Republicans also are so. (Don’t take my word for it. When caught on hidden video, Democratic operative and vote-fraud specialist Scott Foval himself admitted that Republicans, except at the highest levels, are more apt to follow rules.)

In contrast, large metropolises’ anonymity makes vote fraud far easier. Moreover, since they’re ridden with all sorts of crime, it’s not surprising that the crime known as vote fraud is also more common. Note as well that big cities are Democratic bastions.

Statewide electoral-college systems would eliminate this skulduggery, as a major metropolis could deliver only a set number of electoral votes no matter how wide the victory margin was within it.

Yet the idea of tying electoral-vote number to turnout (which appears to be Lopez’s intent) isn’t ideal for combating fraud. After all, couldn’t a big city perhaps fraudulently inflate its turnout numbers to gain electoral votes? Moreover, shouldn’t we encourage not turnout but transformation? Inducing detached, “low-information” citizens to cast ballots because it’s “the thing to do” is akin to urging everyone to take a turn at a Boeing 777-200LR’s helm — and supposing this would somehow improve air travel.

All this said, Lopez’s idea has little chance of passing in Colorado. The system as is works for the establishment just fine.

I've been suggesting intra-state electoral colleges since 2019:

From March 23, 2019:

This is why I've been suggesting that instead of eliminating the Electoral College or bypassing it with schemes like the National Popular Vote compact, we incorporate electoral colleges in the several states instead.
My plan is to encourage state legislatures to exercise their Constitutional powers to choose the method of selecting Electors, and move to establishing state electoral colleges based on the lower chamber of their legislatures. Let the party that controls the Assembly select their Electors to the Electoral College.
The people still vote, but locally. The biggest cities in each state will no longer dominate the state. The Assembly itself will act as a statewide electoral college that gives all regions of each state a voice.

From April 1, 2019:

My idea is to let the Assemblies in such states as the legislatures of those states choose, to act as electoral colleges in their states.
First, the people vote in their local districts for their Assemblyman. Then, the party that controls the Assembly gets to choose the Electors to the Electoral College.
Now, this could work as a winner-takes-all if the Assembly wants to do that, but if they have to vote on a slate of Electors, it's likely that if the Assembly is closely split that a compromise slate might be offered where the losing side still gets a few Electors, so that the whole slate can pass.
One possible problem to sort out is what happens if the winning Assembly party was the minority party before the election? In this case, the winning side won't take over until January of the next year, but the Electors are due to vote in December before the winning party takes control of the chamber.
In that case, I'm back to the idea that the Assembly doesn't vote on a slate, the party that wins simply announces a slate. However, they can still compromise with the other party if they want, knowing how "compromise" works in the long run with Democrats.

From May 5, 2019:

what if a state appealed to its voters by saying that the Electoral College slate will be determined by the party that holds the most seats in the state legislature's lowest chamber?
So, this means that state voters would have to vote for their assemblymen, and then the party with the majority in the Assembly selects the Electors to the Electoral College.
This leverages the people's representation, assuming that the majority will for their statehouse aligns with the majority will for the White House, but there is no statewide "popular vote" for President.
Would it fly? Who knows? People might say that it doesn't reduce election costs because it takes away only one question on the ballot. On the other hand, it would eliminate endless Presidential campaign commercials on TV if the elections are for local assembly candidates.
Imagine an election in a state where the majority in the Assembly selects the Electors. You would be voting for Joey Bagadonuts for your local district, and if there are ads at all (beyond lawn signs and mailers), what would they say? Joey would say that he supports Trump while Mary Bagelschmear would support Bernie Ocasio Harris. Meanwhile, Joey wants to improve the local high school while Mary wants to raise taxes for the hospital.
How do the national candidate ads play out in this state? Does Trump hold a rally with Joey Bagadonuts? What if there are a dozen Assembly districts in the state? Does he hold one large one, or several regional ones, or does he stay away and just endorse Joey?

From May 16, 2019:

My suggestion is for some states to enact what is effectively electoral colleges inside their states. One simple approach would be to declare that the party that wins control of the lower chamber of the legislature (usually the assembly) determines the state's electoral college makeup.
Voting would be at the state assembly district level. Voters would be voting for their local state assembly representatives. It wouldn't matter if the party wins the chamber by 1 vote or 1 million votes. For example, Texas has 150 Representative districts; Republicans hold 83 seats and Democrats hold 67 seats. Therefore, Texas' Electoral College votes would go to the Republican. Or, the chamber may decide to split the vote if the chamber is more evenly divided.

-PJ

An equally favorable result could be to “federalize” the Colorado state Senate, so that there was two Senators per county and the Senators were elected to their terms by the county. As it is now, the Colorado Senate as “Senate Districts” At least then the State Senate would be the body representing the counties, as political entities, just as the U.S. Senate was supposed to be until the 17th Amendment - which was the true beginning of the “Progressive” era.

Here is a Colorado state county map (64 counties):

https://geology.com/county-map/colorado.shtml

And herr is the map of the Colorado State Senate districs (35)

https://coleg.maps.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=e651bcd208074533a11152b4690024bc

Between the two maps you can see how the “popularly elected State Senate districts are no different than the State House districts, favoring higher population areas over equal representation of the counties.

If I were that GOP candidate I’d change my approach and go for a change to select State Senators by county, selected by the county governments. That would “federalize” the representation of the counties and produce a State Senate that could act as a brake on the popularly elected State House.

Well no, it’s about as Constitutional as it gets.

The idea was, that one or two big cities, the large population centers couldn’t dominate the rest of the state, the entire state. I think it’s a balance. And we’ve seen the damage that Reynolds v. Sims has done in the interim. State like California Oregon and Washington, even Illinois.

In a similar way, the Electoral College was designed to prevent a few large cities from dominating the entire country. It requires a candidate to be more broadly representative, and pay at least some attention to rural concerns. Nobody outside New York and Los Angeles say, would hardly matter any longer.

Those who think they are in favor of doing without the Electoral College should think of this analogy - let’s say there were World elections.

Would they suggest that it was a good idea that only India and China voters decide everything?

From Reynolds v. Sims:

Scotus: “We hold that, as a basic constitutional standard, the Equal Protection Clause requires that the seats in both houses of a bicameral state legislature must be apportioned on a population basis. Considerations of history, economic or other group interests, or area alone do not justify deviations from the equal-population principle.”

With these words, the philosopher-kings of the Warren court tossed aside three hundred years of good governing practice. Until Reynolds, states often apportioned senatorial districts by counties. After Reynolds, One-Man-One-Vote became the bumper sticker standard for all state legislative houses. This little-known decision is at least partly, if not largely, responsible for the growing fiscal emergencies in many states.

Reynolds v. Sims is the judicially imposed, unconstitutional state level equivalent of the 17th Amendment, which democratized the US Senate. Senator Dirksen of Illinois summed up the effect of Reynolds when he warned that Chicago would come to dominate Springfield. He was right, and with help from Reynolds, Illinois is near bankruptcy and losing population as people flee high taxes, higher unemployment, and societal destruction.

Progressing the Constitution: One Man One Vote.

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