Republicans Really Want Land to Vote Everywhere... What's Next?

Here's something I hadn't heard before (quoting The Weekly Sift):

A Republican candidate for governor in Colorado proposes that the state adopt its own version of the Electoral College for gubernatorial elections, one that would boost the power of rural counties and diminish urban centers like Denver. (Source)

"Under [Greg] Lopez’s plan, [the 2018] governor’s race would have been a runaway win for Republicans, who lost the actual race by double-digits when each vote was weighted equally."

Right now, anybody who predicts Republicans will actually do such a thing would be dismissed as a partisan crank, in accordance with the David Roberts’ principle stated at the top.

Not only would Lopez's plan weight by landmass/lack of density, it would give extra weight to high-voter-turnout areas. It's a perfect example of a policy proposal that appears to be neutral on its face (sure, anyone can get voter turnout!) that is obviously structurally racist and classist in its outcome…if two seconds of thought are applied.

Lopez actually went on the record with this doozy: “It’s not about one-person, one-vote. It’s about true representation.”

That quote is a perfect fit with former Secretary of State Mike Lee's October 2020 tweet:

Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.

Rank* democracy. Rank democracy. I may never get over that.

The David Roberts principle referred to by The Weekly Sift is from a recent tweet, which I had also been saving for my monthly Twitter round-up:

Take any horrible thing the right wing is doing, call it X. Go back in time two years and publicly predict: “the right wing is going to do X.” You will be dismissed as a partisan crank. This has been reliably, consistently true throughout the entire right-wing escalation. Still true today.

In case you didn't know it (I didn't until not too long ago), Mississippi had such an anti-majority law for statewide offices on its books until 2021. Since 1890, their state constitution had required a majority of the vote plus a majority of the 122 state House districts, which somehow are majority-white in 66 districts, even though white people make up only 56% of the population... amazing how that happens. 

This Jim Crow-era provision was ended by the state's voters in the November 2020 election, at the same time that they also voted to take the Confederate flag off their state flag, replacing it with a magnolia bloom.

What an improvement (despite the need for those words to balance out the loss of the old racist symbol).

________

*When Mike Lee's "rank democracy" tweet came out, I spent some time looking into the meaning of the adjective "rank." To my surprise, I found that the first meaning is listed as a relatively neutral meaning like "total" or "thorough." An intermediate definition that has a somewhat negative connotation is "excessive." The second definition in my late-1970s Webster's is "offensively gross or coarse," and that's more like the definition I have in my head. And then, of course, there's always the "rancid" meaning waiting in the wings to lend itself as a connotation.

Smelly, excessive democracy.