Michigan, Pennsylvania Republicans still seek Electoral College change to gain presidency for GOP

The 20 Electoral College electors from Pennsylvania chosen in 2012. Republicans in four GOP-controlled states'Virginia, Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida'all retreated on a plan to apportion their votes in the Electoral College by the popular presidential vote in each congressional district rather than the statewide winner-take-all approach now in place.

If those states and two others, Pennsylvania and Michigan, had adopted the apportioned voting system before the 2012 election, a guy name Willard Romney would now be sitting in the Oval Office scheming how to pay for another $200 billion a year in Pentagon spending by selling gobs of public land and eviscerating the Health and Human Services Department.

But while those four states have given up for the time being, neither Pennsylvania nor Michigan have, as Jamelle Bouie points out:

Over the weekend, thirteen GOP Pennsylvania Senators, led by Majority Leader Domini Pileggi, introduced a new plan to redistribute electoral votes by congressional district. Under this legislation, the winner of the state's congressional districts would receive the most electoral votes, even if she lost the popular vote. In other words, it would reward candidates for winning land, not people.

With such an arrangement in place, Romney would have won eight of the 20 Electoral College votes in Pennsylvania. Barack Obama won by 310,000 popular votes in the state.

And in Michigan, writes Gary Heinlein at the Detroit News:

By a 1,370-132 margin at the party convention in Lansing, GOP members approved a resolution backing a proposal from Rep. Pete Lund, R-Shelby Township, to divvy-up 14 of the state's 16 electoral votes according to which candidate got the most votes in each congressional district. The other two would go to the state-wide vote total winner.

That switch from a winner-take-all formula that has been in effect 175 years could water down the dominance Democrats have had in Michigan in presidential elections for the last 24 years.

For Romney, a switch to the apportionment model would have meant gaining nine of the state's 16 electoral votes last year. Romney lost in Michigan by 449,000 votes.

The proposal didn't make it through the Michigan legislature last year, and Republican Gov. Rick Synder has opposed it. He has argued that such a move should only take place when it doesn't obviously give the advantage to one party or another. That would be, he says, a couple of years before the next census and redistricting in 2020. But that stance was announced before his state party's delegates voted 91 percent in favor of the idea.