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1/25/2013 1:54:44 PM
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You know which party is trying to undermine American democracy?

I'll give you a hint. It's not the Democrats. When people grounded in reality are handed a stunning rebuke by the people they're meant to serve, they reexamine their positions and make necessary changes to their ideology to compete with their opponents. Unfortunately, Republicans haven't been grounded in reality for quite some time. So when they get slaughtered in an election, they don't think the problem is with the Republican party. They think the problem is with democracy. I mean, why should they let a majority decide on their government when the majority doesn't buy their nonsense? [url=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/24/republican-vote-rigging-electoral-college_n_2546010.html]So here is their new plan[/url]. Basically, it awards electoral college votes based on individual congressional districts. The main argument against the electoral college is that it decouples the end results from the popular vote. There are the cases where this makes a difference (Bush v Gore), but they're rare. Most people who suggest reforms to the electoral college do it to make it more similar to the popular vote. But those silly Republicans don't do what most people do. Instead, they want to decouple it even more. If this plan were in place during the 2012 election, we'd be under a Romney administration. Even though Obama won the popular vote 51% to 47%. That's about 5 million votes. So the Republicans want to invalidate a pretty large majority in order to push their will. You may be asking why moving to congressional electoral college makes so much of a difference. If you're a little more entwined in politics, you may be thinking that the Republicans can't be that unpopular. After all, they control the House of Representatives. And in a normal functioning democracy, both of these claims would hold water. But the GOP has been assaulting Democracy for a few years now so we're looking at a different picture. Congressional districting is left up to the states. The number of districts is awarded based on population. After the census every ten years, states normally go through a redistricting process. Unfortunately for Democracy, the most recent redistricting coincided with a massive victory for Republicans in the 2010 election. The economy was still bad, the Tea Party was at full strength, midterm elections are historically good for the party opposing the president, etc. They won handily at the federal and state level. The state level victories allowed them to rig districts so that Democrat voters would not be equally represented. How did that turn out? [url=http://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjYj9mXEIO_QdHZCbzJocGtxYkR6OTdZbzZwRUFvS3c#gid=0]Despite getting more votes for Democratic candidates in the House of Representatives, Republicans came out with a sizeable advantage[/url]. So we have a Republican party who has rigged districts to maintain control of the lower house of Congress, and wants to base the presidential election off of those heavily rigged Congressional districts. This would end up erasing a 1.1 million vote lead for House Democrats and 5 million vote lead for the current president, and keeping power in the hand of the conservative political elite even more than it is. But somehow the background checks for guns and extension of unemployment benefits are doing to undermine Democracy.

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