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There is a proposal in Texas to require statewide offices to win the popular vote in a majority of Texas counties. Sort of an "electoral college" for the state. Personally, I think this is genius. It balances out the interests of the rural and urban populations. Urban populations can always tax themselves for urban needs, pass rules of local application. So why should rural populations be subject to those taxes and rules with remote benefits and application?
It also reduces (at the state level) one risk of open borders: flooding cities with illegal aliens who are then somehow able to vote and influence state policies. For the illegal aliens to have the same impact under the Texas proposal, they would have to be distributed throughout the state and not simply concentrated in metropolitan areas.
The article linked above complains that this would shut Democrats out of state power in Texas permanently. But that isn't true. What it does is permanently end certain ideologies from becoming state law if there is no majority of counties wanting it. The Democrats are free to pursue policies that actually appeal to a majority of counties rather than simply buying votes in depressed but populous urban centers.
There is some criticism that the proposal violates the Voting Rights Act because it dilutes the power of racial minorities in urban centers. But minorities are free to move to rural areas to the extent they are not already there. And a recent SCOTUS decision kind of calls the game on racial gerrymandering, anyway.
I hope it comes about in Texas and that my state adopts it as well. And I can't imagine any blue state adopting this approach as it would at least flip them to purple, if not red. (Californians outside of about 12 of the 58 counties would be absolutely thrilled to have the opportunity to influence state policies through their votes.) I know that the proposal would also result in smaller populations having disproportional power. But the alternative is what we have now, which can result in geographic disproportionate power.
The Electoral College made it so that a president had to appeal nationwide and not just to a handful of megacities. It's time to apply that to the states as well.
Discussion (21)
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I woke up this morning thinking about the county-unit system that was law in Georgia when I was growing up there. It was effective in keeping the Fulton County-Atlanta population from controlling all the state offices. It was banished in the sixties under the one man-one vote concept, a decision I think was wrong. The person voting in the county is getting one man-one vote for their representative. Votes for state offices are a separate matter.
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Thank you for bringing attention to this election reform situation in Texas. It gives me hope.
Also giving me hope: Californians are now fed up with the "run off voting situation" which was sold to us voters as being one thing and ended up being another.
As it was being sold to us, Republicans and libertarians understood the in's and out's of this idea. But being a Democrat when this came to pass, I was given totally false info.
We Dems were told it would broaden the ability of third party candidates and others to appear on the ballot. But if I had read the actual language of the bill, or talked to any Republican friends about it, I would have discovered it was much more dastardly than what was being portrayed.
In many cases these days, except for the offices of US Senator and the Oval Office, we end up with only two choices on the ballot for so many various offices - both of them being Democrats!
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What we need is less democracy. The founding fathers of the nation feared it. This requirement seems like a good anti-democratic step to take. Pennsylvania would be a better place if this could be done here.
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It took me a long time to realize why the county-unit system was in place in Georgia. It is exactly what needs to be done when big cities will not choose election integrity. Election integrity means no cheating.
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I was amazed - although I should not be - to discover that some of the bigger censorship efforts that Elon Musk has been calling out have labeled themselves as being outfits like "Election Integrity Awareness" or some such other such misleading terms.
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