Colorado gubernatorial candidate Greg Lopez is in search of a way to help Republicans win in this heavily Democratic state, and it involves getting rid of the one-person one-vote paradigm and replacing it with an electoral college approach of peculiar character. He’s got it all worked out:
Lopez said his electoral college plan would weight counties’ votes based on their voter turnout percentage to encourage turnout.
“I’ve already got the plan in place,” Lopez said. “The most that any county can get is 11 electoral college votes. The least that a county can get is three.” [9News]
Onwards to the exceptionally dubious summation by Lopez:
“It’s not about one-person, one-vote,” Lopez said at the May 15 campaign stop. “It’s about true representation.”
It conveniently ignores differences in population, doesn’t it? If you’re in a ten person county, your vote will weigh far more than if you’re in a one hundred person county.
Then there’s that pesky winner-take-all stipulation implied in the proposal. A candidate wins an important county by a single vote and they get all the electoral votes. This is representation how?
It’s not, is it? Just a poorly thought out scheme to grab power.
9News, of course, analyzed how such a system would have changed the last election, for what it’s worth:
9NEWS analyzed how Lopez’s proposal could have impacted the results of the 2018 gubernatorial race. In lieu of details on the plan from the Lopez campaign, 9NEWS sorted the 2018 county turnout percentages in the gubernatorial race and sorted then into as equally-sized tiers as possible, assigning 11 electoral votes to the highest turnout tier and three electoral votes to the lowest turnout tier.
Under Lopez’s plan, that governor’s race would have been a runaway win for Republicans, who lost the actual race by double-digits when each vote was weighted equally.
Democrat Jared Polis defeated Republican Walker Stapleton by more than 10 percentage points. Lopez’s electoral college plan would have swung that race for Republicans by nearly 30 percentage points, resulting in the equivalent of an 18 percentage point victory for Stapleton over Polis.
And this dude is the best that Colorado Republicans can manage for the governor’s seat? They’re just crumbling into dust, it seems.
