Bell Curve The Law Talking Guy Raised by Republicans U.S. West
Well, he's kind of had it in for me ever since I accidentally ran over his dog. Actually, replace "accidentally" with "repeatedly," and replace "dog" with "son."

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Gerrymandering the Electoral College

Interesting tidbit. As you may know, the Congress is preparing to pass a bill that would increase the House to 437 reps permanently, adding 1 for DC and 1 for Utah. The Utah seat would be at-large until post-census redistricting (and reapportionment) in 2010. The interesting effect is on the electoral college. DC already gets 3 EV, and would not get any more under the 23rd amendment ("...but in no event more than the least populous state"). But Utah's EV would be calculated by adding the total number of reps + senators. So Utah would get +1 EV (increase from 5 to 6). This means there would be 539 EV available, not 538.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting! So... no more ties in the Electoral College. I wonder if the authors of the bill thought of that? Nice catch, LTG.

Anonymous said...

The other thing to consider here is that Utah is even more heavily Republican than Texas. This is a fairly transparent move to gain yet one more small edge in a Presidential election system already biased towards rural, conservative interests. 

// posted by RBR

The Law Talking Guy said...

Actually, ties are still possible (269-269-1) with faithless electors or weirdos. Recent weirdos:
2004: one guy from MN voted for Edwards for President.
2000: one of the DC electors refused to cast a vote for Gore as a protest against DC statehood.
1988: one elector voted for Lloyd Bentsen for president.
1976: one elector voted for Ronald Reagan.
1972: one elector voted for John Hospers(?).

Of course, we assume in a close election this wouldn't happen. But, after Florida in 2000 and 9/11, it's a new world...