A WISGOP legislator, Rep. Gary Tauchen, has drafted a bill to award Wisconsin’s electoral votes by congressional district, thereby maximizing the importance of gerrymandering.
Melanie Conklin writes that GOP has bill to reallocate Wisconsin’s electoral votes by congressional district:
And that is what a new bill authored by Rep. Gary Tauchen (R-Bonduel) would do. It would make Wisconsin a state where the winner of the popular vote does not get all — or even necessarily the most — Electoral College votes. Tauchen’s bill (LRB 0513/1) would distribute the presidential electors by assigning one vote for each of Wisconsin’s eight congressional districts, then giving the remaining two electors to the statewide winner of the popular vote.
That would exacerbate partisanship and give added incentive to gerrymander the map of Wisconsin’s congressional districts to favor one party over the other, says UW-Madison Prof. Barry Burden, founder and director of the Elections Research Center.
“Doing it by congressional district is actually a terrible idea, because what it will do is amp up the partisan efforts to draw those districts to favor one side or the other,” says Burden. “It’s already an ugly process, but it will be on steroids if those districts affect not only control of Congress but also control the presidency.”
As the WISGOP successfully gerrymandered (after the last census) legislative districts against the popular vote statewide, and as they’ll do what they can to gerrymander districts for another decade, re-apportioning most electoral votes is consistent with earlier schemes by boosting a losing GOP presidential candidate against a more popular opponent.
As these WISGOP men have gerrymandered with impunity, they’ve come to see gerrymandering not as a manipulation of democracy, but rather as an expression of how politics should, and must always, favor them.
After a bit, it may have begun to seem natural, yet lamentably transitory.
A corruption of legislative boundaries for a mere decade is perhaps all-too-brief: why take for ten years when one could take for twenty, thirty, or fifty?