August 10, 2007 - 11:04am
Electoral Vote Reforms
By Christine WhitmanThis past week in North Carolina, state legislators were working on a plan to change the way the state allocates its electoral votes. Instead of awarding the winning presidential candidate all electoral votes from the state, the votes will be allocated based on the winner in each Congressional district. The legislators who pushed this plan - all Democrats - suggest that this will make the state more competitive and will serve as an incentive for more candidates to spend time in the state.
Unfortunately, North Carolina - home to the most infamous gerrymandered district in the country - is the wrong place to experiment with this kind of electoral vote allocation. In some places, North Carolina's 12th Congressional district, for example, is literally no wider than the highway it follows from one end of the state to the other. It is such an extreme case of political gerrymandering that the Wall Street Journal called the district "political pornography." As a result, the district's constitutional legitimacy has been challenged countless times and has bounced around various state courts and even the U.S. Supreme Court.
New Jersey, however, would be a good place to change the electoral vote allocation system - we should move from a winner-takes-all system to awarding by congressional district. We have successfully moved our primary to be relevant, but so have 17 other states. The chance of winning some electoral votes would bring both parties into the state not only just to raise money, but also to discuss issues, making New Jersey an important part of the 2008 campaign.
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Holy Partisan Poltrude, Batman!
What a load of crap.
First, Christie makes it sound as if the only place in the world considering this kind of change is North Carolina and it's those Democrats doing it to take advantage of gerrymandered districts. North Carolina is primarily a Republican state when it comes to electoral votes, and the Dems would pick up a few of those votes.
Yet for some reason no mention of California where millions of dollars are being spent by a lawyer for the Republican Party to enact the same plan there! California has 55 votes, and under such a Plan Bush would have received 22 more electoral votes in 2004, seven more than are even possible in NC. Why no mention of the bigger, more serious effort out west? Could it be that when Republicans do it Christie doesn't mind, but if those big bad Dems do it a column is in the works!
To make matters worse, Christie then suggests that NJ SHOULD engage in such a plan with its 15 electoral votes. Dems almost always win NJ's electoral votes, so Christie's Republicans would get more votes.
But NJ's districts are gerrymandered, as well. It was created to protect the incumbents and essentially guarantee that there would be 7 Dems and 6 Reps in the House delegation.
With the way the state has been going, does anyone really think that a straight balanced and ungerymandered map would result in a 7-6 delegation?
Christie is just trying to win some free electoral votes for her team.
Fix the basic problem first
Why don't we concentrate our efforts and money on solving the basic problem of voter fraud. I'm sure many of you have read about ACORN and it's problems. I think we should have voter identification when registering to vote, and when you go to the voting booth.
Sorry, Gov. Whitman ...
A little hypocritical there. What's good for the Republicans isn't good for the Democrats?
(And that's speaking as a Jersey Guy whose mom is a Jersey Girl -- and whose dad is from North Carolina ...)