Today's The Day

From the AP:

Presidential electors are meeting across the United States on Monday to formally choose Joe Biden as the nation’s next president.

Monday is the day set by law for the meeting of the Electoral College. In reality, electors meet in all 50 states and the District of Columbia to cast their ballots. The results will be sent to Washington and tallied in a Jan. 6 joint session of Congress over which Vice President Mike Pence will preside.

The electors’ votes have drawn more attention than usual this year because President Donald Trump has refused to concede the election and continued to make baseless allegations of fraud.

Locally, Representative Mike Kelly and (not-Representative Sean Parnell) have also refused to accept reality:

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Mr. Kelly’s emergency appeal to void the results of the Nov. 3 election in a one-sentence decision with no noted dissents from the court, which holds a 6-3 conservative majority after three justices were appointed by Mr. Trump.

Mr. Kelly’s case argues that an October 2019 state law that allowed “no-excuse” voting by mail, required an amendment to the Pennsylvania Constitution. The suit sought to toss out some 2.6 million ballots cast by Pennsylvanians who requested a ballot without a reason, which would hand Mr. Trump the state’s electors.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected the case, reasoning that the plaintiffs should have challenged the law’s constitutionality long before votes had been cast. 

In the interview, Mr. Kelly insisted that the fight was not over. And on Saturday, he demonstrated that: A news release from his office said he again had gone to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking the justices to consider the constitutionality of Pennsylvania’s Act 77 “mail-in voting scheme.”

Good luck with that, Congressman Mike (and Not-Congressman Sean). 

If I may be so bold, it might be better for your future credibility for you to pull up your big boy pants accept your respective defeats as it's simply the honorable thing to do. 

You remember what "honorable" felt like, right?

Anyway, the public can track the votes at:

• The Washington Post

And if you're still among teh crazies who think the whole thing was stolen, you might want to read this. 

Suck it up and face reality. Today's the day the electors fulfill their constitutional duty and vote to make it official: Joe Biden will be the next President of the United States of America.

Another Threat To Our Democracy

While the GOP has been warning us for years about the (illusory) "significant voter fraud" and its (supposed) threat to our democracy, the real threat is coming from them.

 From Talkingpoints Memo:

Call it a gaffe: a slip-up that accidentally reveals the truth.

A recent memo by the Republican State Leadership Committee emphasizes the party’s 2010 victories in state legislatures as central to the House GOP retaining its majority in the 2012 elections.

The reason? Redistricting — or more precisely, gerrymandering.

From the memo:

The rationale was straightforward: Controlling the redistricting process in these states would have the greatest impact on determining how both state legislative and congressional district boundaries would be drawn. Drawing new district lines in states with the most redistricting activity presented the opportunity to solidify conservative policymaking at the state level and maintain a Republican stronghold in the U.S. House of Representatives for the next decade.

And:

President Obama won reelection in 2012 by nearly 3 points nationally, and banked 126 more electoral votes than Governor Mitt Romney. Democratic candidates for the U.S. House won 1.1 million more votes than their Republican opponents. But the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives is a Republican and presides over a 33-seat House Republican majority during the 113th Congress. How? One needs to look no farther than four states that voted Democratic on a statewide level in 2012, yet elected a strong Republican delegation to represent them in Congress: Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

And this is what the Republican Gerrymandering accomplished:

A REDMAP target state, the RSLC spent nearly $1 million in Pennsylvania House races in 2010 – an expenditure that helped provide the GOP with majorities in both chambers of the state legislature. Combined with former Republican Attorney General Tom Corbett’s victory in the gubernatorial race, Republicans took control of the state legislative and congressional redistricting process. The impact of this investment at the state level in 2010 is evident when examining the results of the 2012 election: Pennsylvanians reelected a Democratic U.S. Senator by nearly nine points and reelected President Obama by more than five points, but at the same time they added to the Republican ranks in the State House and returned a 13-5 Republican majority to the U.S. House.

According to Fairvote.org, had these new laws been in place before the 2012 election, Obama's overwhelming win would have been (with exactly the same votes) much much closer.

And now what are the Republican legislators in Harrisburg looking to do with these manipulated-for-the-benefit-of-the-GOP congressional districts?

State Senator Domini Pileggi has an idea: "Proportionality."  Take a look:

Under the proportional system, two of Pennsylvania’s 20 electors are chosen on a statewide, at-large basis (representing the two senatorial electors). The remaining 18 electors are chosen based on the percentage of the statewide vote earned by each candidate (rounded to the thousandths). For example, President Obama won 52.088% of the vote in November. Under this system, he would have received 12 of Pennsylvania’s 20 electors (the two statewide electors plus 10 of the 18 remaining electors, which would be distributed proportionately).

This advantage of this system is clear: It much more accurately reflects the will of the voters in our state.

Yea, but since the electoral votes would be distributed by gerrymandered congressional district (districts that benefit the GOP), we all know that that last part's plainly incorrect.

Message from this state's Republicans in the state legislature: When you can't win fairly, simply legislate a change of the rules (i.e. cheat legally).

From George Will...

From the pages of the Tribune-Review, we have this from the man who predicted 321 electoral votes for Mitt Romney:

The electoral vote system, so incessantly and simple-mindedly criticized, has again performed the invaluable service of enabling federalism — presidents elected by the decisions of the states’ electorates — to deliver a constitutional decisiveness that the popular vote often disguises.

Republicans can take some solace from the popular vote. But unless they respond to accelerating demographic changes — and Obama, by pressing immigration reform, can give Republicans a reef on which they can wreck themselves — the 58th presidential election may be like the 57th, only more so.

He's already making a prediction about the next presidential election.

Now, about that popular vote.  According to CNN, Obama received 60,662,601 votes to Romney's 57,821,399.  This is not counting Florida - where they haven't made results official.  If we add the known votes (4,143,362 for Obama, 4,096,346 for Romney) to the above totals we get 64,805,963 votes for Obama and 61,917,715 for Romney for a total of 126,723,708 votes for the two candidates.

That's 51.14% to Obama and 48.86% to Romney.  That's just over 2.25 percentage point difference - hardly something to cheer about given the state of the economy, unemployment and the the millions in rightwing PAC money (thanks to Citizens United) poured into the race.

But you can't expect much from someone who got the electoral math that wrong.

They Haven't Won PA Since 1988 - So Now They Change The Rules

A few astute readers emailed in yesterday about Governor Corbett's game changer.

We'll start, as we almost always do, with the P-G:

Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi, R-Delaware, is pushing to change the state's "winner-takes-all" approach for awarding electoral votes to doling them out to presidential contenders by congressional district.

That proposal, first reported by online news service Capitolwire on Thursday, could significantly revamp the state's role in the presidential general election.

"It would not only change the type of attention that Pennsylvania would receive in a presidential election, but it would also choose where in Pennsylvania that attention occurs," said Pileggi, following his appearance at the Marcellus Shale Coalition conference in Philadelphia Thursday morning.

And from the Tribune-Review:

Republicans in charge of the General Assembly want to change how the state hands out its electoral votes, a move that could reshape the national electoral strategies of future presidents and diminish Pennsylvania's role in choosing the country's leader.

Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi wants to allocate the 20 electoral votes Pennsylvania will have in the next election according to who wins each of 18 congressional districts, plus two more for whoever wins the statewide popular vote, rather than the winner-take-all system the state now uses.

Pileggi said the new formula would better reflect what voters want.

The funny part, is that with the very next paragraph, the Tribune-Review tells us that's, basically BS:

In 2008, for instance, when Pennsylvania had 21 electoral votes, Sen. John McCain won 10 congressional districts to then-Sen. Barack Obama's 9, but Obama won the state by 620,000 votes. Under Pileggi's proposal, Obama would've gotten the two statewide electors, for a net win over McCain of one electoral vote.

So winning the state by more than a half-million votes counts for just one extra electoral vote. To Pileggi, that's what "better reflect what voters want" means.

Make no mistake, it's a transparent ploy. A ploy to help out (of course) Pileggi's and Corbett's fellow republicans in the upcoming presidential election.

But would it help them all? Not everyone in the Statewide GOP is drinking the kool-aid. From Dan Hirshhorn at Politico:

With next year’s presidential election expected to be hard-fought, even sapping some electoral support from Barack Obama in Pennsylvania could have a major impact on the national results. But to several Republicans in marginal districts, the plan has a catch: they’re worried that Democrats will move dollars and ground troops from solid blue districts to battlegrounds in pursuit of electoral votes — and in the process, knock off the Republicans currently in the seats.

Suburban Philadelphia Reps. Jim Gerlach, Pat Meehan and Mike Fitzpatrick have the most at stake, since all represent districts Democrats won in the last two presidential elections. They and the rest of the Republicans in the delegation are joining with National Republican Congressional Committee officials to respond and mobilize against the change.

“Any proposed change to the election laws shouldn’t be done under the radar,” Fitzpatrick told POLITICO. “If every vote matters, everyone should have a chance to discuss this.”

State GOP chairman Rob Gleason is also opposed to the plan.

And:

“You’re asking the southeast Republican county parties to go toe-to-toe with the Philadelphia Democratic machine, in money and manpower,” a senior national Republican official said. “It’s a matchup that we not only lose in 2012, but one that decimates the Republican Party in southeast Pennsylvania.”

The DailyKos has a deeper explanation:

Put simply, awarding electoral votes by congressional district would be a disaster for Democrats. Democratic voters tend to be much more concentrated in urban areas while Republican voters are typically more spread out. That means that the average blue seat is much bluer than the average red seat is red, which in turn means that there are more Republican-leaning districts than Democratic-inclined CDs.

Here's one stark illustration. John McCain's best district in the nation was TX-13, which occupies the Texas panhandle. He won there by 77-23, a 54 percent margin. By contrast, there were 39 districts that Barack Obama won by an equal or bigger spread, all the way up to his 90-point victory in New York's 16th Congressional District in the South Bronx.

More concretely, if Pennsylvania's proposed system were in place nationwide, Obama's 365-173 electoral college romp would have been a much tighter 301-237 win. Meanwhile, George W. Bush's narrow 286-251 victory over John Kerry would have turned into a 317-221 blowout. And just as bad, Bush's razor-thin 271-266 margin over Al Gore would have been a more comfortable 288-250 spread for Dubya, making Gore's "loss" despite winning the national popular vote even more galling.

Which is why the GOP is for it. Which is why they think it's fair.

But it ain't - and there's 620,000 reasons why.