It’s not just for Congressional Districts anymore!

This time the Republicans want to take over an entire state’s electoral votes, by changing from the “winner-take-all” system that’s been in place for 200 years in Pennsylvania to “one electoral vote per Congressional District plus one for each Senate seat.”

Under the Republican plan, if the GOP presidential nominee carries the GOP-leaning districts but Obama carries the state, the GOP nominee would get 12 electoral votes out of Pennsylvania, but Obama would only get eight — six for winning the blue districts, and two (representing the state’s two senators) for winning the state. Since Obama would lose 12 electoral votes relative to the winner-take-all baseline, this would have an effect equivalent to flipping a medium-size winner-take-all state—say, Washington, which has 12 electoral votes—from blue to red. And Republicans wouldn’t even have to do any extra campaigning or spend any extra advertising dollars to do it.

[snip]

“The Constitution is pretty silent on how the electors are chosen in each state,” says Karl Manheim, a law professor at Loyola University in Los Angeles. The GOP plan “would certainly increase the political advantage of politically gerrymandering your districts,” he adds.

Says Fiddler, the DLCC spokeswoman: “This would effectively extend the effect of gerrymandering beyond Congress and to the Electoral College. State legislatures could gerrymander the Electoral College.”

This may not be illegal or unconstitutional, but it’s as blatant a political ploy as I’ve seen since Tom DeLay successfully redistricted Texas’s Congressional seats in 2003.

There’s some pushback from GOP members in Pennsylvania who don’t want heavy Democratic get-out-the-vote campaigns in their mostly-safe districts in the Philadelphia suburbs, so we’ll see what happens next.