Category Archives: redistricting

Rob Richie and Devin McCarthy have written this Philly.com oped, which begins: “State Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi piqued our interest last week when he told Bloomberg that his new electoral reform proposal “is not party-specific or partisan in any way, but just an attempt to have the popular vote reflected.” Pennsylvanians’ votes certainly weren’t reflected after a majority of them chose Democratic House candidates last month. In a remarkable distortion of voter preference, Republicans won 13 of the state’s 18 House seats. But Pileggi (R., Delaware) was proposing Electoral College reform. Like most of the states, Pennsylvania awards all its electoral votes to the statewide popular-vote winner. Pileggi proposes that most of the state’s electoral votes instead be allocated in proportion to the popular vote, which would have given President Obama 12 of them – rather than the 20 he got – and Mitt Romney eight. This plan is problematic, especially if the state pursues it unilaterally.”

“For one party to win a majority of House seats with a minority of votes is a relatively rare occurrence. It has now happened five times in the past hundred years. In 1914 and 1942, the Democrats were the beneficiaries. In 1952, 1996, and this year, it was the Republicans’ turn to get lucky, and their luck is likely to hold for many election cycles to come. Gerrymandering routinely gets blamed for such mismatches, but that’s only part of the story. Far more important than redistricting is just plain districting: because so many Democrats are city folk, large numbers of Democratic votes pile up redundantly in overwhelmingly one-sided districts. Even having district lines drawn by neutral commissions instead of by self-serving politicians wouldn’t do much to alter this built-in structural bias. Of course, the perversities of our peculiar electoral machinery can cut both ways. Before November 6th, there was much speculation that Obama, like Bush in 2000, might lose the popular vote while winning in the electoral college. It didn’t happen, but the speculation was far from idle. If Romney had run more strongly throughout the country, he might have beaten Obama by as many as two million votes and still have lost the Presidency.”