Democracy? Who Cares!

The Republicans lost the 2012 elections, Obama was re-elected as president and Democrats increased their majority in the Senate and gained seats in the House. Rather than change the outlook of their party the Republicans have a different plan: destroy democracy. Although that sounds a bit exaggerated, there is reason to believe that Republicans have had enough of democracy! Leading up to the 2012 elections numerous Republican controlled states attempted to introduce photo ID laws. The issue with this is that a significant proportion of the electorate doesn’t have photo ID and would therefore be disenfranchised! These people also tend to vote Democratic, coincidence? I think not. Naturally the people attempting to carry out these tactics won’t admit to doing so as controversy would ensue. What Republicans are using as an excuse to for their tactics is ‘rampant’ voter fraud. The problem with this argument is that the type of voter fraud that would be prevented by this is basically non-existent! We are talking about a dozen cases in as many years. So the Republican reasoning for disenfranchising up to 10% of the electorate is to stop voter fraud which happens roughly once a year in an electorate of 200 million. Fortunately most of the laws were blocked or struck down by courts before the November elections. If you don’t think that this is evidence enough that the Republicans tried photo ID laws to disenfranchise Democrats then I turn to the leader of the Pennsylvania House, Mike Turzai (R):

“Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania: done,”

If that’s not proof that the ID laws were only meant to help Republicans, I don’t know what is.

In 2012 this wasn’t the only anti-democratic moves made by the Republican Party. As a result of the 2010 mid-term elections Republicans took control of many traditionally blue states. Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin all gained Republican state Houses, Senates and governors. This basically mean that Republicans could do whatever they wanted, the same was true in most swing states. Unfortunately this meant that when the census figures were released, Republicans were able to re-draw the congressional districts to favour themselves. This is why the Republicans have a 33 seat majority in the House of Representatives despite Democrats winning 1.5 million more votes! The gerrymandering of congressional districts meant that results in several states were completely skewed. In Pennsylvania there were 100,000 more votes for Democrats than Republicans, yet Republicans won 13 seats to the Democrats five! In Michigan Democrats won 300,000 more votes yet only five of the 14 seats and in Wisconsin 50,000 more votes for Democrats meant only three of eight seats. Although Republicans did win more votes in other states such as Ohio and Virginia, the resulting House delegation was still disproportionate. In Ohio the difference in the vote was 5% but Republicans won 12 seats to the Democrats four and in Virginia the Republicans had 2% more of the vote but eight of the 11 seats!

This is terrible for democracy in America, when one party completely disregards the will of the people. Yet worse may still come. Republicans still control the state houses and senates thanks to Gerrymandering and now Republicans are considering something extremely radical. Some Republicans are floating the idea of rigging the presidential election as well as the House elections. What they want to do is allocate the Electoral College votes for president using the gerrymandered house districts! So far Republicans in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida have all floated the idea, if they had done this before the 2012 election then there would be currently a President Romney, despite him trailing Obama by 5 million votes nationwide. Although in most cases the laws look likely to fail, Republicans fear a public backlash against such blatant disregard for Democracy. In a number of these states the balance of the chambers is such that only a few Republicans need to oppose the idea for it to fail. Quite why America can’t simply elect a President by who gets the most votes nationwide eludes me, until this can be resolved; America’s democracy will be under threat.