Earlier this year, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett (R) announced a plan to essentially rig the 2012 presidential election by giving away up to a dozen of the state’s electoral votes to whoever gets the Republican nomination. Under Corbett’s plan, each of the state’s 18 congressional districts — which are being gerrymandered so that as many as 12 of them favor Republicans — would choose how to allocate a single electoral vote rather than having all of the state’s votes go to the winner of the state. Democrats won Pennsylvania in every presidential election since 1992 — but Corbett’s plan would all but ensure that the GOP candidate received more electoral votes from the state even if the state’s voters decisively prefer to reelect President Obama.

Since Corbett announced this election rigging plan, numerous Republicans have opposed it on the grounds that it could endanger a few Republican House seats by causing the Obama campaign to shift resources into those districts (no Republican seems bothered by the fact that rigging elections is wrong). For now, these dissenters appear to be carrying the day:

Republican-sponsored proposal to change how Pennsylvania’s electoral votes are counted in next year’s presidential election appears to be running out of steam. [...] “I see no movement on it. I’m not going to push for movement, but I still support it,” Corbett, a Republican, told a Pennsylvania Press Club luncheon. [...]

Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi, the bill’s sponsor, responded to Corbett by saying that advancing the bill would require a considerable effort by the Senate, the House, and the governor.

“At this time, my primary focus is completing our work on legislation regarding education reforms, the Marcellus Shale industry, and transportation funding,” wrote Pileggi (R., Delaware). “When those items are finished, we can revisit the Electoral College reform legislation, although I do not believe there will be sufficient time to advance it this year.”

So the good news is the plan is probably dead. The bad news is that it can be revived at any time. Unlike many other states engaged in drastic GOP overreach, Pennsylvania has no provision for citizens to repeal laws by referendum, and no provision to recall manifestly unfit elected officials such as Tom Corbett.

In other words, there is nothing other than sheer public outrage preventing Corbett from reviving this plan in late 2012 if it looks like President Obama is headed towards a close victory that could be prevented by some creative election rigging tactics.

Last month, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett (R-PA) announced a plan to rig the 2012 presidential election by effectively giving away up to a dozen of the state’s electoral votes to the Republican candidate. Now, as Dave Weigel reports, the Wisconsin GOP is considering the exact same plan:

In Wisconsin, Republican Rep. Dan LeMahieu is asking his colleagues to sign onto a bill that would change the state’s method of picking electoral college electors — a plan identical to the one alive, if losing some steam, in Pennsylvania.

“This bill would change Wisconsin to a state using the Congressional District Method,” explains LeMahieu in a letter to colleagues. “Each congressional district would choose their own Electoral College vote based on the popular vote in that congressional district and the 2 at large votes would be decided by the popular vote of the entire state.” [...]

In the 2008 election, a vote-split wouldn’t have made much of a difference for Wisconsin’s electors. Barack Obama took the state by 14 points, winning all but one of eight fairly un-gerrymandered congressional districts. But had this been in place four years earlier, John Kerry would have won only six of ten electoral votes — two statewide, one for each district. And Wisconsin hasn’t gone Republican since 1984, when Ronald Reagan defeated Walter Mondale by 9 points.

As Weigel notes, this effort to render democracy irrelevant in Wisconsin was inevitable. Indeed, ever since Gov. Scott Walker (R) was sworn in last January, Wisconsin has become ground zero for GOP efforts to ensure that only Republicans can win elections. Walker stripped state workers of their right to organize to strengthen the GOP’s position in the next election. He gutted the state’s public financing system, which allows candidates to run effective campaigns without pleading for money from big dollar donors, and used this money to pay for a voter ID scheme that disenfranchises thousands of poor, minority and student voters.

Conservatives can normally rely on George Will to provide a gloss of pseudo-intellectual legitimacy to their worst policy proposals. Will is a passionate global warming denier. He called Americans upset about the 2008 economic downturn the “crybabies of the western world.” And he even spent an entire column praising the Supreme Court’s discredited decision in Lochner v. New York, which struck down a state worker protection law largely because five justices felt like it.

Yet, for all of Will’s willingness to carry water for the most repulsive and out of touch ideas, even he is offended by Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett’s (R) plan to rig the Electoral College in order to elect a Republican president in 2012:

Republicans supposedly revere the Constitution, but in its birthplace, Pennsylvania, they are contemplating a subversion of the Framers’ institutional architecture. Their ploy — partisanship masquerading as altruism about making presidential elections more “democratic” — will weaken resistance to an even worse change being suggested.

Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled Legislature may pass, and the Republican governor promises to sign, legislation ending the state’s practice — shared by 47 other states — of allocating all of its electoral votes to the candidate who wins the statewide popular vote. Pennsylvania would join Maine and Nebraska in allocating one vote to the winner in each congressional district, with the two remaining votes going to the statewide popular vote winner. [...] The Electoral College today functions differently than the Founders envisioned — they did not anticipate political parties — but it does buttress the values encouraged by the federalism the Framers favoured, which Pennsylvanians, and others, should respect.

As with most Will columns, there is also a lot to not like in his rejection of the Pennsylvania vote rigging plan. Among other things, the “even worse change” Will refers to is the entirely sensible National Popular Vote compact, which would ensure that the person who gets the most votes actually gets to be president of the United States. Nevertheless, Will’s break with Corbett on Corbett’s plan to rig the presidential election is a hopeful sign that establishment conservatives are turning against that plan.

Earlier this week, a Pennsylvania state Senate committee held a hearing on Gov. Tom Corbett’s (R-PA) plan to rig the 2012 presidential election by giving away up to a dozen of the state’s electoral votes to the GOP candidate. During the lengthy hearing, witnesses from the League of Women Voters and Common Cause mentioned a more sensible way to modify the presidential election process — the National Popular Vote (NPV) compact, which would ensure that the candidate who gets the most votes actually wins the election.

Yet the mere mention of allowing the president to be chosen according to the will of the people launched Republican state Sen. Mike Folmer into an unhinged rant about the Weimar Republic, the constitutional amendment process, eliminating the 50 states, and Adolf Hitler:

The changes to the Constitution should be and only be through the amendment process. If you don’t do it through the amendment process, then you are usurping the will of the people, and that’s my point. You’re right [the framers] weren’t saying the Constitution is closed. Do you know why the Weimar Republic failed, sir? And Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were able to take over? Because their constitution was closed, and Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were able to use their constitution on the German people and get the support of the German people that way, and they used the law against them. My point in this is this: if we go to a national popular vote, then we might as well get rid of the 50 individual states, we might as well get rid of it and go to a…

At this point in Folmer’s rant, he was cut off by the committee’s Republican chairman.

Watch it:

It’s difficult to count all the problems with Folmer’s rant, but one of his most glaring errors is his weak grasp of the U.S. Constitution. Contrary to Folmer’s suggestion that national popular vote would require a constitutional amendment, the NPV compact works by getting a bloc of states equal to the number of electoral votes necessary to elect a president to all agree that they will give their support to whoever the American people as a whole choose to lead them. This compact is constitutional because the Constitution expressly allows states to join together into multi-state agreements just so long as Congress approves the agreement.

It’s little surprise that Folmer doesn’t understand how the Constitution works, since he is a big supporter of efforts to write a time bomb directly into our founding document. Folmer recently proposed a federal constitutional amendment that would “give the citizens of the United States a direct vote on Federal borrowing and indebtedness through national referenda.” If Folmer’s amendment every became law, it would lead to routine national votes on whether or not the United States should have a catastrophic default on its national debt.

In other words, Folmer thinks its a grand idea to have regular elections on whether or not American should commit suicide, but he is utterly outraged by the suggestion that a majority of the American people should be able to choose the president.

Earlier this month, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett (R) proposed rigging the 2012 presidential election for the Republican candidate by effectively giving away as many as a dozen of the blue state’s electoral votes to that candidate. Under Corbett’s scheme, each of the state’s 18 congressional districts will allocate one electoral vote during the 2012 election, rather than having the state’s entire electoral vote go to the overall winner of the state. Because the GOP will also gerrymander these districts ensure that up to 12 of them are solidly Republican, the purpose of Corbett’s plan’s is to ensure that President Obama will get less electoral votes than his challenger even if he wins the state as a whole.

Yesterday, however, nearly every single Republican member of Congress from Pennsylvania met with state lawmakers to oppose Corbett’s vote rigging scheme — warning that it could potentially endanger their own ability to hold their seats. According to the subscription-only site Capitolwire:

Most of the state’s Republican congressional delegation met with top state House and Senate leaders backing colleagues who want to sideline a pair of controversial bills: a Senate-proposed electoral college change bill, and a mandate that Pennsylvanians show photo ID before voting.

Eleven members of the state’s 12-member congressional Republican delegation met with Senate leaders this afternoon . . . . The congressmen also voiced opposition in both meetings to Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi’s proposal to split up the state’s 20 electoral votes by congressional district, in 2012. Pileggi, R-Delaware, heard out comments against his proposal from U.S. Reps. Bill Shuster, R-Blair, Tim Murphy, R-Allegheny, Jim Gerlach, R-Chester, Charlie Dent, R-Lehigh and Meehan.

All stressed the negative impact this could have by making swing U.S. House districts more competitive, and more expensive.

The fact that several Republican lawmakers objected to the Pennsylvania GOP’s proposed voter ID law is a particularly interesting wrinkle in this drama. Voter ID laws, which disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of poor, minority and student voters, have been the centerpiece of the Republican Party’s war on voting — an effort which also includes making it harder to register to vote and taking away opportunities to vote early.

As it turns out, however, Republican members of Congress in Pennsylvania care a whole lot less about mucking with the rules to benefit the GOP as a whole than they do about keeping the same rules in place that allowed them to get elected in the first place.

While in Washington yesterday, longshot presidential contender Rick Santorum (R-PA) expressed his approval for a scheme by Pennsylvania Republicans to split up the state’s electoral votes. Bucking the winner-takes-all tradition (which awarded all of the state’s votes to Barack Obama in 2008), the plan proposed by GOP Gov. Tom Corbett is a nakedly partisan attempt to give away as many as a dozen of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes to the Republican presidential candidate for free.

Slate’s Dave Weigel reports that Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania, had no qualms about admitting that the idea is a transparently political ploy designed to advantage his party:

“Certainly, from the standpoint of a Republican, it’s a winner,” Santorum said. “Republicans will come out ahead in Pennsylvania in every election. The way Democrats win, they have two big cities with huge concentrations of voters — and then overwhelm the rest of the state.” [...]

“All of a sudden, a Republican can win — and would probably routinely win — all but three or four congressional districts in Pennsylvania,” he said. “It would turn it from a state Democrats rely on, as part of the base, to a state that they’re gonna lose under almost any scenario.”

Weigel observes that Republicans’ real problem seems to be that “because the votes of urban Democrats count as much as the votes of suburban Republicans, Democrats are often able to win Pennsylvania by getting more people to choose their candidate.” So Republicans have devised a scheme to award some votes to their guy even when most Pennsylvanians don’t vote for him! Santorum also seemed to be all in favor of gerrymandering tactics that would pour all urban Democrats into a few seats, thereby allowing Republicans to further maximize their voting power.

Nebraska is one of just two states which allocates its Electoral College votes by congressional district — a fact that enabled President Obama to win one electoral vote in the state despite losing the state as a whole in 2008. The Nebraska Republican Party, however, just voted to twist its own lawmaker’s arms to prevent this from happening again in 2012:

[T]he [Republican state central] committee approved a resolution that would deny party support to any Republican state senator who fails to support legislation returning Nebraska to a winner-take-all presidential electoral vote system.

An ancillary effect of that action, primarily designed to wipe out any Democratic opportunity to pick up the 2nd Congressional District electoral vote for the second presidential election in a row, could be depression of Democratic activity in the Omaha district to [Sen. Ben] Nelson’s disadvantage.

As a matter of electoral fairness, there is no reason why Nebraska should use a different system than any other state — and, indeed, it would undermine the legitimacy of a second Obama term if the only reason Obama won reelection was a bizarre quirk in one state’s law. Nevertheless, the timing of the Nebraska GOP’s decision to eliminate this quirk before a hotly contested election suggests that it has little to do with preserving the legitimacy of 2012′s winner and everything to do with manipulating the state’s law to the GOP’s advantage.

Moreover, the GOP’s plan to make a solid red state a winner-take-all state stands in stark contrast to their plan to force blue Pennsylvania to give away as many of a dozen of its electoral votes to whoever wins the Republican presidential primary. As Alexander Burns explains, “a voter could be forgiven for thinking lawmakers are trying to tinker with the rules of the 2012 race for purely partisan reasons.”

Last week, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett (R) announced a plan to rig the 2012 presidential election by effectively giving up to a dozen electoral votes away to the Republican presidential candidate for free. Under Corbett’s plan, each of the state’s 18 congressional districts — which are being gerrymandered so that as many as 12 of them favor Republicans — would choose how to allocate a single electoral vote rather than having all of the state’s votes go to the winner of the state. The plan is opposed by several GOP congressmen, who fear that its new set of rules will cause the Obama campaign to shift resources from bluer parts of the state into their districts.

Nevertheless, Corbett and his chief ally in the legislature, GOP Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi, are not swayed by these congressmen’s claim that it is more important to protect their seats than it is to steal the election. According to the subscription-only site Capitolwire:

Gov. Tom Corbett and Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi, R-Delaware, have not budged from their support of a plan to change the allotment of Pennsylvania’s presidential votes. [...] Pileggi said “nothing I have heard” from congressional and state party and national party leaders “indicates that the bill does not have the right objective, that it is not a good objective. I have heard about concerns and questions about money, about clout. I’m interested in fairness to the voters and citizens of Pennsylvania, I’ll leave the rest of those issues to political consultants and the political apparatus in Washington, D.C.” [...]

“There’s a real debate in the party about this, about whether Sen. Pileggi’s bill should be adopted or not,” said Matthew Brann, chairman of the Northeast Central Caucus. “If we’re a state in play, with 20 electoral votes, then I think we probably shouldn’t do it. If we are not, then there is a case to be made for doing this.”

So for those of you keeping track at home, here are the three factions within the Pennsylvania GOP.

• Just Rig The Election Already: Gov. Corbett and Sen. Pileggi fully support the plan. In Pileggi’s words, they have heard “nothing” indicating that this election rigging scheme “does not have the right objective.”
• Protect Me First: GOP Reps. Jim Gerlach, Pat Meehan and Mike Fitzpatrick care more about keeping their own jobs than they do about electing a president who will eliminate Medicare, so they oppose a plan which might endanger their ability to get reelected in what have traditionally been Democratic-leaning districts.
• Be More Coldly Calculating: Perhaps the most despicable faction is captured by Matthew Brann’s statement that Corbett should only rig the election if he is not sure the GOP can carry the state. This faction apparently believes that the biggest problem with Corbett’s election rigging scheme is that it could backfire and benefit the Democrats

Sadly, there does not appear to be any faction within the Republican Party that opposes rigging elections because rigging elections is wrong.