Pennsylvania House Republicans Introduce Bill To Rig The 2016 Presidential Election

Earlier this week, Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus endorsed a Republican plan to rig the next presidential election to make it nearly impossible for the Democratic candidate to win the White House, no matter who the American people vote for. The election-rigging plan, which would allocate electoral votes by congressional district rather than by states as a whole in a handful of states that consistently vote for Democratic presidential candidates, would have allowed Mitt Romney to narrowly win the Electoral College last November despite losing the popular vote by nearly four points.

On Monday, seven Pennsylvania Republican state representatives introduced a bill to make this vote-rigging scheme a reality in their state. Under their bill, the winner of Pennsylvania as a whole will receive only 2 of the state’s 20 electoral votes, while “[e]ach of the remaining presidential electors shall be elected in the presidential elector’s congressional district.”

Pennsylvania is a blue state that voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in every single presidential race for the last two decades, so implementing the GOP election-rigging plan in Pennsylvania would make it much harder for a Democrat to be elected to the White House. Moreover, because of gerrymandering, it is overwhelmingly likely that the Republican candidate will win a majority of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes even if the Democrat wins the state by a very comfortable margin. Despite the fact that President Obama won Pennsylvania by more than 5 points last November, Democrats carried only 5 of the state’s 18 congressional seats. Accordingly, Obama would have likely won only 7 of the state’s 20 electoral votes if the GOP vote rigging plan had been in effect last year.

One mitigating factor is that only 7 of the Pennsylvania House’s 109 Republicans are original sponsors of the election-rigging bill, so it is unclear that this is a major priority for the GOP state house caucus. Nevertheless, both Gov. Tom Corbett (R-PA) and state Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R-PA) support the plan, so there is a real risk that Pennsylvania Republicans will try to write the voters out of the next presidential election.

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OP: Yeah, I was sort of wondering when they'd try to do this. It's surprising that they haven't tried sooner.

It would happen a couple of times each month at the Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago. Ben Hagen would giggle and then send out a web link to his coworkers, the geeks who ran the technology operation for the Obama reelection campaign.

Soon, the sound of Kenny Loggins’ inspirational 1979 hit “This Is It” would fill the office, and the dancing Otter would pop up on machine after machine. It was Hagen’s way of telling the team he’d found another bug in their web code.

The geeks who built Obama’s internet infrastructure sat side-by-side, in a long row in the campaign’s Chicago headquarters, and sometimes, you could hear Kenny Loggins echo down the line. “The laughing would kind of work its way down the row and you’d see people’s screens light up with dancing otters and the sound progressing down the row,” Hagen says. “It was a pretty gratifying experience.”

It was gratifying because Hagen — a security engineer with the campaign — was helping to lock down Obama’s websites, securing them from a common web programming error called a cross-site scripting bug. The otter was the campaign’s version of the RickRoll — an annoying internet joke — but it also carried a message. In essence, Hagen was publicly shaming people into writing better code.

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Sauce.

Idaho Lawmaker Wants States To Prevent Obama’s Re-Election

One Idaho state lawmaker is still in denial over election results and would like to see states challenge the legitimacy of Obama’s reelection. Last week, Idaho State Sen. Sheryl Nuxoll (R) amplified a debunked theory circulating Tea Party blogs, that claims Romney still has a chance to win if enough states refuse to participate in the Electoral College.

Nuxoll linked to the debunked idea in a tweet, afterward telling the Spokane Spokesman-Review “I don’t know if it’s realistic”:



Even though Obama won 51 percent of the popular vote, by Nuxoll’s reasoning, “states are going to have to stand up for our individual rights and for our collective rights” because he is “depriving us of our freedoms.”

Constitutional Accountability Center’s Emily Phelps explains why the idea that unhappy Republicans can prevent the Electoral College from reaching a “quorum” is completely wrong: “A quick reading shows that [Tea Party Nation's] Phillips has his voting bodies backward. There is no quorum requirement for the Electoral College. If pro-Romney electors boycotted the meeting as Phillips has urged, the others would simply meet without them and elect President Obama.”

The original story on World Net Daily, a conspiracy site that regularly pushes “birtherism”, now has a major caveat. The site’s editors added the note: “Since this column was posted it has been discovered that the premise presented about the Electoral College and the Constitution is in error. According to the 12th Amendment, a two-thirds quorum is required in the House of Representatives, not the Electoral College.”

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OP: Ah... What is that weird voting thing again?

Sen. Mark R. Warner co-sponsors FAST Voting Act

~Incentive grants for states to expedite voting, reducing lines and wait times~
CONTACT: Kevin Hall (Warner) 202 228 6884, Ian Koski (Coons) 202 224 4216

WASHINGTON – U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-VA) joined Sen. Chris Coons (D-DEL) in introducing legislation today that will make voting faster and more accessible to all voters. The Fair, Accurate, Secure and Timely (FAST) Voting Act of 2012 creates a competitive grant program to encourage states to aggressively pursue election reforms. It would provide incentives for states like Virginia to invest in practices and technology designed to expedite voting at the polls and simplify voter registration.

The bill was introduced a week after an Election Day that saw extraordinarily long lines in Virginia and in a dozen other states. Some voters in Prince William County, for instance, reported waiting in lines for up to three hours. Wait times reportedly stretched to five hours at some voting precincts in Chesapeake, and more than four hours at polling places in Virginia Beach.



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Mark Warner is also part of the so-called "Gang of Eight" coalition that's determined to be a bipartisan budget committee. Tim Kaine is slated to join his group once he is sworn in
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Source:http://truth-out.org/news/item/12638-millions-of-voters-demand-constitutional-amendment-to-overturn-citizens-united

Grassroots campaigns with the lofty goal of amending the US Constitution to overturn the Supreme Court's landmark 2010 Citizens United ruling got a thumbs up from millions of voters across country on Election Day.

Voters approved ballot measures in two states and more than 120 cities in several states calling upon legislators to pass an amendment to the Constitution to overturn the Citizens United ruling that unleashed the deluge of unfettered campaign spending that helped make 2012 the most expensive election season in history.

The ballot measures faced little organized opposition, and voters approved every measure placed on ballots by campaign finance reform activists across the country. In several cases, 70 percent to 80 percent of voters supported the measures.

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As Nation and Parties Change, Republicans Are at an Electoral College Disadvantage

Two more presidential elections, 2016 and 2020, will be contested under the current Electoral College configuration, which gave Barack Obama a second term on Tuesday. This year’s results suggest that this could put Republicans at a structural disadvantage.

Based on a preliminary analysis of the returns, Mitt Romney may have had to win the national popular vote by three percentage points on Tuesday to be assured of winning the Electoral College. The last Republican to accomplish that was George H.W. Bush, in 1988. In the table below, I have arranged the 50 states and the District of Columbia from the most Democratic to the most Republican, based on their preliminary results from Tuesday. Along the way, I have counted up the number of electoral votes for the Democratic candidate, starting at zero and going up to 538 as he wins progressively more difficult states.

This process resembles how the FiveThirtyEight tipping-point analysis was calculated. In the simulations we ran each day, we accounted for the range of possible outcomes in each state and then saw which states provided Mr. Obama with his easiest route to 270 electoral votes, the minimum winning number. The state that put Mr. Obama over the top to 270 electoral votes was the tipping-point state in that simulation.

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Revenge is a Dish Best Served Cold.

How the GOP’s War on Voting Backfired

Since the 2010 election, Republicans passed new voting restrictions in more than a dozen states aimed at reducing the turnout of Barack Obama’s “coalition of the ascendant”—young voters, African-Americans and Hispanics.

“This is not rocket science,” Bill Clinton said last year. “They are trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like the 2010 electorate than the 2008 electorate.” By pushing voter suppression laws, Republicans wanted the 2012 electorate to be older, whiter and more conservative than the young and diverse 2008 electorate.

But the GOP’s suppression strategy failed. Ten major restrictive voting laws were blocked in court and turnout among young, black and Hispanic voters increased as a share of the electorate relative to 2008.

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Dear Australian Electoral Commission,

This is just a little note to thank you for being the way you are. And an apology for taking you for granted all this time. Like many millions of Australians, I'm guilty of thinking you a little fusty, with your anally retentive rules and your little cardboard demountable booths.

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Arizona: the money laundering state

Trying to avoid an audit, American for Responsible Leadership this morning admitted that the $11 million it sunk into two California campaigns wasn’t really from the Arizona PAC.

Instead it came through a "daisy chain" of political PACS – all run by GOP operative and Koch brothers pal Sean Noble.

And all created to hide the true source of the money.

Arizonans should be outraged  to see our state used as what essentially amounts to a money laundering service. But also because $1.5 million of that money from supersecret sources has been used to convince you to vote against Props. 204, the education sales tax, and 121, the Open Elections Open Government initiative.

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I live in a purple part of the country (Virginia) and move in academic circles, so of course I know many, many people who will be voting for Obama. It is impossible to know, but if I sodomized the Easter Bunny in front of their children the look on my Obama-voter friends’ faces could scarcely be much different than the look they get when I say I am voting for Jill Stein.

“But this is a swing state…you have to vote for Obama…what if Romney wins?!?”

The pain in their voices tugs at my sympathies; their fear is very real. I want to reassure them, but I was cured a few presidential elections ago. I won’t be drinking from that cup again.

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