In 2019, the Democrat-controlled Colorado Senate joined a liberal-state pact designed to eliminate our nation’s Electoral College system. Now a Colorado gubernatorial candidate is, far from just mounting a defense against this, taking the offense:
He has proposed instituting an electoral college within his state.
It’s an idea that not only could help rural Centennial State counties, but also could virtually neutralize vote fraud’s effectiveness. The Washington Examiner reports on the story:
One candidate in Colorado’s gubernatorial election has called for eliminating its one-person, one-vote approach in favor of a state-level electoral college….
Greg Lopez, a Republican candidate for Colorado’s governor, has pitched the idea of using an electoral college-based approach for statewide political office, arguing the current system favors large cities at the expense of more rural counties.
“One of the things that I’m going to do, and I’ve already put this plan together, is, as governor, I’m going to introduce a conversation about doing away with the popular vote for statewide elected officials and doing an electoral college vote for statewide elected officials,” Lopez said in audio acquired by 9News in a report published Wednesday.
The plan would weigh a county’s votes based on the number of voters in the district in hopes of increasing 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.”
As indicated above, note that Lopez’s electoral vote system differs from our national one in a significant way: According to what he states in this 9News report, a county’s electoral votes would be apportioned based on turnout.
Under this system, Republicans would’ve fared far better than they did in the 2018 election, contend observers. As Raw Story relates, “Democratic Gov. Jared Polis, who won the 2018 election by double digits, would have received 181 electoral votes to the 263 earned by his Republican opponent, Walker Stapleton. ‘Lopez’s weighting system would have given the 2,013 combined voters in Hinsdale, Kiowa and Mineral counties a total of 33 electoral votes, more than double the 14 electoral votes of Denver, Arapahoe and Adams counties’ combined 761,873 voters,’ said the [9News] report.”
Rural counties’ residents nationwide have sometimes lamented their lack of representation, as their state and national governments’ natures are often determined by their major cities. For example, New York is mostly rural, and the vast majority of its counties voted for President Trump in 2020. Yet the massive left-wing population in New York City and its environs ensures the Empire State will support the Democratic presidential contender every election and will itself be an unassailable leftist bastion. The same is true of Illinois.
Of course, Democrats don’t like Lopez’s idea, and liberal Raw Story writes that his “plan would almost certainly be unconstitutional under the Supreme Court’s landmark 1964 ruling in Reynolds v. Sims, which enforced the principle of ‘one person, one vote’ in state elections.” Yet, if true, someone ought to inform ex-federal judge Stephen Robinson.
Robinson is the judge who more than a decade ago approved a plan to give every resident of Port Chester, N.Y., six votes in village elections. The goal was to increase the chances of getting Hispanics elected in the thinking that the locality’s Latino residents would be more likely (profiling?) than others to exhibit ethnic patriotism and pool their votes.
(Also worth mentioning: In 2020, a college professor proposed that blacks’ votes be worth twice those of whites, as a form of reparations.)
What’s more, why a statewide electoral-college system mirroring our national one should be unconstitutional Raw Story did not explain.
Yet such an idea’s value extends far beyond providing greater rural representation; it also would largely neutralize vote fraud. Why?
Stealing an election, as occurred in 2020, requires manipulating the vote not only in just a handful of swing states — but merely in one or two cities/counties within each of those states.
That is to say, if you discard opposition party votes and/or manufacture your side’s ballots in, for example, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh — the former of which is a notorious vote-fraud hotbed — you can swing the whole state of Pennsylvania and capture its 20 electoral votes. The same is true of Detroit in Michigan, Milwaukee in Wisconsin, and Fulton County in Georgia: Cooking the books in those population centers will neutralize the rest of the states’ counties’ influence.
This fraud is a big-city phenomenon, too. Small populations and intimacy — everyone knowing everyone — make massive-scale rural-area vote fraud unrealistic. Consider as well that country folk are more law-abiding in general and that, corresponding to this, Republicans also are so. (Don’t take my word for it. When caught on hidden video, Democratic operative and vote-fraud specialist Scott Foval himself admitted that Republicans, except at the highest levels, are more apt to follow rules.)
In contrast, large metropolises’ anonymity makes vote fraud far easier. Moreover, since they’re ridden with all sorts of crime, it’s not surprising that the crime known as vote fraud is also more common. Note as well that big cities are Democratic bastions.
Statewide electoral-college systems would eliminate this skulduggery, as a major metropolis could deliver only a set number of electoral votes no matter how wide the victory margin was within it.
Yet the idea of tying electoral-vote number to turnout (which appears to be Lopez’s intent) isn’t ideal for combating fraud. After all, couldn’t a big city perhaps fraudulently inflate its turnout numbers to gain electoral votes? Moreover, shouldn’t we encourage not turnout but transformation? Inducing detached, “low-information” citizens to cast ballots because it’s “the thing to do” is akin to urging everyone to take a turn at a Boeing 777-200LR’s helm — and supposing this would somehow improve air travel.
All this said, Lopez’s idea has little chance of passing in Colorado. The system as is works for the establishment just fine.
