Great take: The House – new, with less democracy!

[Coexist]

from Sam "I'll eat a bug" Wang

However, this is quite notable. The popular vote was a swing of more than 6% from the 2010 election, which was 53.5% R, 46.5% D. Yet the composition of the House hardly changed – and the party that got more votes is not in control. This discrepancy between popular votes and seat counts is the largest since 1950.

Did I underestimate the tilt of the playing field? Based on how far the red data point is from the black prediction line, the “structural unfairness” may be higher – as much as 5% of the popular vote. That is incredible. Clearly nonpartisan redistricting reform would be in our democracy’s best interests.

from New Deal Democrat over at Boddad Blog

That means amending the Constitution. If it won't be spoken of inside the Beltway, if it won't be acknowledged in the mainstream media, at least out here in the Oort Belt of the blogosphere, we need to speak the truth bluntly.

The four necessary Amendments to the Constitution are:
- an Anti-Gerrymandering amendment
- an Anti- Filibuster amendment
- an Anti-lame duck Congress amendment
- a *COUNTERCYCLICAL* balanced budget amendment

An Anti-Gerrymandering Amendment. We just had an election that produced the most lopsided House of Representatives vs. popular vote in over 60 years - and for only the second time in that period, handed a majority of seats to the party that obtained a minority of the total vote. Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium shows that this outlier is so bad, it appears that it would have taken a 5% popular vote majority for democrats to produce even a 1 seat majority. If you don't believe me, click on the link and take a look at his scattergraph, and read his excellent analysis.

....

Before you decide that such a scenario isn't realistic, you might want to consider that there are a fair number of nearly 100% African American Congressional districts. You might also want to note that in Pennsylvania this election, the Democrats got only 5 of 18 House seats, and in Ohio the Democrats got only 4 of 16 House seats, despite the total popular vote in each being majority Democratic.

....

Even worse, there have been proposals to change "winner take all" Presidential electoral college allocations in, for example and not surprisingly, Pennsylvania. Imagine a Presidential candidate winning the popular vote in a state and obtaining only about 1/4 of its Electors! That's the direction in which we are going.

and rumor has it that Husted in Ohio is also toying with "reforming" the Electoral College.

Indeed, if the Corbett/Husted plan to rig the Electoral College had been law in several key Republican-controlled states that President Obama won last Tuesday, America would now be looking at a very different future. Assuming that Mitt Romney won every congressional district that elected a Republican House candidate in these key states, the Corbett/Husted plan would have given Romney 17 electoral votes in Florida, 9 in Michigan, 12 in Ohio, 13 in Pennsylvania, 8 in Virginia, and 5 in Wisconsin — for a total of 64 additional electoral votes.

Add those 64 votes to the 206 votes Romney won legitimately, and it adds up to exactly 270 — the amount he needed to win the White House.

Florida is gerrymandered to within an inch of its life.

These people are just kinda gross. I have no other comment right now.