I’m not sure about this.
Saying Texas’ current practice is discriminatory, a group of Hispanic activists and lawyers has sued the state in hopes of blocking it from awarding all of its Electoral College votes to one candidate during presidential elections.
The lawsuit filed in federal court Wednesday calls on Texas to treat voters “in an equal manner” by abolishing that “winner-take-all” approach, which all but two states use. The suit, filed by the League of United Latin American Citizens and a coalition of Texas lawyers, says that approach violates the U.S. Constitution and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It’s just one of many pending voting rights lawsuits arguing that Texas, which regularly votes Republican, has illegally discriminated against voters of color.
Similar Electoral College lawsuits were also filed Wednesday in Republican-dominated South Carolina and Democratic-leaning Massachusetts and California. The South Carolina suit also alleges a Voting Rights Act violation.
At the suit’s core is the doctrine of “one person, one vote,” rooted in the 14th Amendment. The plaintiffs argue that the winner-take-all system is unconstitutional because Texans who favor losing candidates “effectively had their votes cancelled,” while voters who favor winning candidates see their influence “unconstitutionally [magnified].” The suit also alleges that winner-take-all violates the First Amendment.
[…]
Lawyers have asked the court to declare the winner-take-all approach unconstitutional and set “reasonable deadlines” for state authorities to propose an alternative system.
The winner-take-all method is nearly ubiquitous — only Maine and Nebraska use other systems. If the plaintiffs were to prevail in their cases, the potential impact on presidential elections would be huge. But it’s unclear how far the cases will go.
I mean, if the end goal here is to abolish the Electoral College and install a straight-up popular vote for President, I’m cool with that. There are political efforts underway to achieve this, such as National Popular Vote that I think are both more promising and more broad-based, but it’s been around for awhile and still has a long way to go. If however the goal is to replace the current system with some other kind of proportional Electoral College system, such as the EVs-by-Congressional-district or EVs-as-a-percentage-of-the-state-vote, then count me out. Both of those are too convoluted, and in the Congressional case subject to its own set of shenanigans, and neither to my mind addresses the “one person one vote” complaint in a satisfactory fashion. The problem isn’t that the Electoral College is broken and needs fixing, the problem is that it was a bad and undemocratic idea to begin with. That’s a worthy goal, and one I support.
This one’s doomed. Under the Constitution states can select electors however they please. Indeed, in 2000 the Florida legislature was considering simply naming the Republican slate of electors no matter how the recount came out.
It’s unfair and undemocratic, but it’s the Constitution. And there really isn’t any other way to read it. The only hope such a suit might have would be to appeal to the state constitution… and considering the political nature of the Texas state bench, that ain’t happening either.