Nebraska lawmakers could soon vote on whether to make their electoral votes a winner-take-all proposition,
The New York Times reports.
The move to amend the state's Electoral Collage rules comes after President Barack Obama earned a lone electoral vote from the deeply red state in 2008 — a black mark on a typically pristine GOP record that some want to ensure never happens again.
Noted the Times of the timing: "Though the bill to change the electoral system has been proposed before, there is a sense that it could have greater momentum this year because of the backing of several newly elected conservative legislators and because a potentially tight presidential election is nearing."
"It’s obvious that the majority of citizens of the state of Nebraska are Republicans," Nebraska's Republican Party Chairman J.L. Spray told the Times. "They want to have the maximum voice in the Electoral College."
Nebraska joins just one other state, Maine, in not awarding all votes to a majority candidate in elections,
the Los Angeles Times reported.
The paper's political columnist, George Skelton, called the Electoral College system bad for two reasons: it can keep a candidate with the most popular votes from winning, a la Al Gore in 2000; and it shuts out the voting in many states in favor of so-called "battleground states," where there is the possibility of an upset.
Skelton described the "winner-take-all" approach as bad for democracy.
The Nebraska legislation was introduced during the first two weeks of the 2015 legislative session by Sen. Beau McCoy of Omaha,
the North Platte Bulletin said. The proposed bill "would award all of Nebraska's electoral votes in presidential elections to the statewide winner rather than splitting votes by congressional districts," it said.
At least one other state is pondering ending the winner-take-all approach. A Michigan bill was introduced into the state Legislature in November by Republican Rep. Pete Lund. It would split the state's 16 electoral votes between the most popular vote-getters in a presidential contest,
the Detroit Free Press reported.
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