Nebraska is one of just two states, the other being Maine, that allocates its electoral votes by congressional district. This unusual system allowed President Obama to win a single Nebraskan electoral vote in 2008, because he carried one of the state’s congressional districts, even though he lost the state as a whole to Republican candidate John McCain. A bill sponsored by state Sen. Beau McCoy (R), however, seeks to ensure that such a result never happens again by aligning Nebraska with the 48 states that award all of their electoral votes to the winner of the state as a whole.
The state’s Republican leadership is not being shy about why they would like this bill to pass. “It’s obvious that the majority of citizens of the state of Nebraska are Republicans,” state Republican Party chairman J.L. Spray told the New York Times.“They want to have the maximum voice in the Electoral College.”
Yet, the fact that Republicans have a partisan stake in this legislation does not mean that there are not perfectly sound reasons why lawmakers could support it. The Nebraska bill is the mirror opposite of a proposal floated by Republicans in several states that President Obama carried in 2012. That proposal sought to rig presidential elections for Republicans by implementing a Nebraska-like system of counting electoral votes in several states that are either fairly consistent blue states in presidential elections or major swing states that recently have favored Democrats. Had these proposals been in effect in 2012, it would have shifted a massive chunk of Obama’s electoral votes to GOP candidate Mitt Romney:
So long as Nebraska (and Maine) use a district-by-district method of allocating electoral votes, they grant a patina of legitimacy to Republican plans to rig the Electoral College by selectively adopting the Nebraska system in blue states that are likely to favor Democratic presidential candidates over Republicans.
Beyond the fact that McCoy’s bill would make straight up plans to rig the Electoral College harder to defend, it also would reduce some of the randomness that can play out under Nebraska’s current system. So long as the Electoral College exists, each election risks a result where the man or woman elected president is not the person who actually received the most votes — a circumstance that most recently occurred in 2000, where the loser of the popular vote, Texas Gov. George W. Bush (R), became president over the winner of the popular vote, Vice President Al Gore (D). If different states use different methods of counting electoral votes, that only adds to the likelihood that an election will turn on quirks in each state’s electoral rules, rather than on the will of the people.