Nov. 6, 2014--Ask any football or basketball
coach.
It's a lot easier to win if you can write your
own rules.
Today the shrinking base of the Republican Party
holds onto power by writing rules giving it a built-in advantage in
elections.
And it works.
Michigan Democrats received more votes for
Congress and more votes for the state House of Representatives than
Republicans.
But Republicans, thanks to the aftermath of 2010,
changed the rules sufficiently so that they maintained their
stranglehold on Michigan government.
The minority party is running the show, and
Democrats can't do much about it.
Even a petition drive is fraught with challenges,
because Republicans in the Legislature have become masters at gaming
the system to prevent citizens from forcing a referendum.
Gerrymandering.
One word that describes why Michigan no longer
has a government that is representative of the electorate.
The
2001 reapportionment had given the GOP the votes it needed to
gerrymander Michigan.
They have repeatedly lost the popular vote for
the Legislature only to win anyway thanks to favorable
districts.
The advantage was doubled in 2011 after another GOP
wave election.
The results:
Democrats actually got plenty of
votes, but Republicans made sure that most of them had no impact.
In
the 14 congressional races, Democrats received more votes than
Republicans:
Democrats: 1,515,716 (49.15%)
Republicans:
1,463,854 (47.47%)
The average margin of victory for winning Dems
was 86,410; the average GOP win margin was 42,243.
All of these
numbers are from the current Secretary of State report and will
likely change a little with the official canvass.
In the races for the state House:
Democrats received more votes but Republicans INCREASED their
majority status:
Democrats: 1,536,812
(50.98%)
Republicans: 1,474,983 (48.93%)
The
Republican maps turned a 61,829 margin FOR DEMOCRATS into a 63-47
"majority" for Republicans.
The average Republican
victory: 6,389 votes.
The average Democratic victory: 10,092.
In the races for the state Senate, the
discrepancy is even more egregious:
Republicans received slightly
more votes than Democrats, but turned a slim total-vote victory into
a super-majority:
Democrats: 1,483,927 (49.23%)
Republicans:
1,527,343 (50.67%)
The Republican maps transforms that slim
43,416 statewide vote margin (1.4%) into a 27-11 advantage (71%) in
the state Senate (one GOP victory, a 61-vote win, could be
overturned on recount).
The average Republican victory: 15,107
votes.
The average Democratic victory: 33,133 votes.
You don't need much voter suppression when you've
figured out a system where your opponents' votes don't really matter
anyway.
On that option of a citizen petition drive to end
partisan redistricting:
Michigan's constitution has a strange
restriction on citizen initiatives.
Laws that include an appropriation, no matter how
small, are exempt from being repealed through a petition drive.
In the last legislative session, the threat of a
successful petition drive to raise the minimum wage prompted
legislators to pass their own--far less generous) minimum wage law
and include in it a small appropriation, making the citizen petition
drive moot.
The same was done with TWO petition drives to
overturn a state wolf-hunting season.
The only citizen alternative is to amend the
state Constitution.
Just getting a proposal on the ballot requires
more than 320,000 valid signatures which would then be scrutinized
and challenged by high-priced GOP attorneys.
Not long ago they successfully challenged a
petition because part of it arguably used a 11-point font instead of
12-point.
Barring a constitutional change in redistricting,
the GOP has built a political perpetual motion machine that will
automatically renew itself every 10 years through map-making that is
more about winning elections than in protecting voting rights
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