Red Sea!

The Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, The Raw Story, The Atlantic, Addicting Info, and Think Progress are concerned with Republican vote rigging and suppression strategies. The Republican governors signed off gerrymandering laws that give the Republicans a stronger district favor. The Democrat may have a strong disadvantage in the 2014 and 2016 U.S. Elections. 

Republicans control 32 of the states/territorial governorships. The Democrats control 21 of the state/territorial governorships. There are 2 independents who serve as governors and one independent who serve as the elected Washington, D.C. mayor.

The Republicans have a strong advantage in governorships. Most of the governors have stuck to their "principles" of union busting, not enacting Obamacare, fighting federal funds for infrastructure repairs to roads and bridges, high speed rail and shipping channels.

The Republicans had a strong opportunity to take back the White House with their shady redistricting. We could have said hello to President Mitt Romney. Thank god that perennial loser didn't win the election.

With Republicans being swept back into power in 2010, the consequences were a result of their hands on approach to congressional seating. 

Remember back in 2010 when the Tea Party got the phobia about the U.S. Census. Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-Minnesota), Congressman Trent Franks (R-Arizona) and former Texas Republican congressman Ron Paul were making such a fuss about the government's civic duty to count the nation's growing population.

The Republicans have a serious issue with minorities and women. So instead of the broad coalition of individuals (minorities and women), the Republicans will play to the social culture warriors (WHITE, OLD, MEN) who doomed them in the last two elections.

The Atlantic's David Graham reports that Republicans are green lighting the winner-takes-all strategy. GOP chairman Reince Priebus favors the idea is to get state legislatures to change the way they allocate electoral votes. Instead of a winner-take-all scheme, which most states use, they want to institute a system where votes could be split between candidates. Now, on face, that might not seem so bad. It would mean that very Republican areas in very Democratic states -- think Orange County, California -- and very Democratic areas in Republican states -- think Austin, Texas -- wouldn't be essentially throwing their presidential votes away. 

Certainly, there are longstanding critiques of the Electoral College. Recently they've mostly come from the left. The 2000 election, in which Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote, was a galvanizing moment. And there are plans to try to rectify the oddness of the Electoral College. For example, the National Popular Vote plan is a push to get states to sign on to a scheme in which they'd award all their electors to the winner of the most votes nationwide. The plan would only take effect once states representing at least half of the electoral votes have joined, guaranteeing its effectiveness.

Romney supporters packing it up!

So this GOP plan is a smart move, driven by politics but with a result that would better reflect the will of the majority, right? Not quite. Here's the twist: The proposal would award electoral votes based on who wins Congressional districts. (That's already how Maine and Nebraska work, but the two states only account for nine of the 538 total electoral votes.)

From a Republican perspective, this is genius, but it's evil genius. It would allow the party to gain electoral votes in swing states and near swing states like Ohio, Colorado, and Michigan that went for Obama in the last two elections but have large Republican constituencies. But you may also recall that the GOP maintained its majority in the House in November but actually won fewer votes than Democrats did in congressional elections overall. This is because the GOP has been extremely effective at gerrymandering House districts. One reason the 2010 election mattered so much is that the Tea Party wave handed control of redistricting after the 2010 Census to Republican-led legislatures in many states. And they didn't waste the opportunity. Now the lines won't be redrawn again until after the next census, in 2020. 

With Virginia playing the game so well, it's possible that many other states will go there soon. 

[So] clearly this isn't a plan that would solve the problem of an undemocratic Electoral College. But it is a plan that would forestall Republican demographic doom. Now, whether instituting these laws would be politically viable is a different question. Even if a few states adopted it, it could change the political landscape. 

And moreover, the plan would disenfranchise voters. Which ones? Mostly the minority ones in cities who helped Obama win this year. Most urban districts are going to vote Democratic, and most rural ones will go Republican. But if votes are quarantined in a single Congressional district, it doesn't matter if the turnout in a city is 50 percent, 70 percent, or 100 percent; there's only one electoral vote on the table, plus the two at-large electoral votes. This takes almost all the venom out of the formidable Democratic get-out-the-vote operation.

There's a certain nihilism here. One of the major storylines of the 2012 election was voter-ID laws and voting hours. While ostensibly formulated to stop voter fraud, there wasn't much voter fraud to stop, and the changed hours tended to affect mostly poorer and urban (and therefore Democratic) voters. In some cases, Republican officials put the changes in starkly honest ways. A Pennsylvania legislator said a voter-ID law would help Mitt Romney win the state (he was wrong), while an Ohio official said voting hours shouldn't be shaped to accommodate the "urban -- read African-American -- voter-turnout machine." For a variety of reasons, however, these pushes didn't work: courts struck down some laws, and voters were willing to wait in long lines to cast their ballots.

But hey, if disenfranchisement didn't work once, just try it again, right? It's not like the GOP's standing with minority and urban voters can get much worse.

So in David Graham's piece on Republicans trying to steal elections is basically simple: If we can't win by the votes of the American people, we'll win by the American governance!

Let's repeat the words of wisdom for the Republicans and their conservative allies:

Republicans continue nominating OLD, WHITE, TIRED LOOKING, IGNORANT, BIGOTS as their leaders. They continue to rally EXTREMISTS with coded language and inflammatory rhetoric!

Conservatives obsess with calling those who supported the president, low information voters and uninformed!

It seems like this last election informed millions of Americans to vote against the Republican nominee, the perennial loser Mitt Romney. It didn't help Republicans win the Senate. It only gave Republicans a small majority in the House of Representatives.

If you consider Americans low information voters and the like: 

Get use to losing because it's not us that's uninformed!

It's likely you! 

I will repeat this over and over again until people notice!