A hidden perk

By Cathy Keim

Editor’s note: Cathy will be delivering the content this weekend while I take a little personal time off. By the way, Sunday will be her first anniversary as a co-author.

I received a “Help Save Maryland” newsletter from Brad Botwin the other day. I read through it and one comment about the illegal immigrant population caught my eye. Most people that worry about voter integrity are concerned that illegal immigrants are voting in our elections. But what if the illegal immigrant population decides the next presidential election without even casting individual votes?

Let’s go back to a quick review of the Electoral College. The Electoral College was put into place to keep the more heavily populated areas in the country from dominating the more rural areas.

Each state receives their number of electoral votes based on their representation in Congress; thus, every state receives two electoral votes for their two Senators. The remainder of their electoral votes are determined by the number of Congressmen they have, which means the minimum number of electoral votes that a state receives is three: two for its Senators and at least one for its Congressman. Being a small state, our neighbors to the north in Delaware only have one at-large Congressman so they get three votes.

Additionally, the District of Columbia is guaranteed the same number as the least populous state (Wyoming in the 2010 census) so the District gets three electoral votes, too.

Every state has two Senators for 100 electoral votes and the District of Columbia receives three electoral votes, so the remaining 435 electoral votes are based on Congressional seats. Every ten years after the census, the Congressional seats are apportioned according to population; however, this is not based on legal population or citizens’ population. The census counts everybody.

So illegal immigrants are counted in the census and their population is then used to apportion Congressional seats. Those Congressional seats each come with one Electoral College vote.

The 435 Congressional districts plus 100 Senators plus three for DC equals the 538 total electoral votes which will decide our next President. The winner will need a majority, or 270 Electoral College votes.

Because of the way the census is conducted, the states with larger numbers of illegal immigrants gain extra seats in Congress at the expense of the states with fewer illegal immigrants. If you were to remove the illegal immigrants from the census and only count citizens, then states like California would lose congressional seats and those seats would be reapportioned to other states. Paul Goldman and Mark J. Rozell noted this last year in Politico:

This math gives strongly Democratic states an unfair edge in the Electoral College. Using citizen-only population statistics, American University scholar Leonard Steinhorn projects California would lose five House seats and therefore five electoral votes. New York and Washington would lose one seat, and thus one electoral vote apiece. These three states, which have voted overwhelmingly for Democrats over the latest six presidential elections, would lose seven electoral votes altogether. The GOP’s path to victory, by contrast, depends on states that would lose a mere three electoral votes in total. Republican stronghold Texas would lose two House seats and therefore two electoral votes. Florida, which Republicans must win to reclaim the presidency, loses one seat and thus one electoral vote.

But that leaves the electoral math only half done. The 10 House seats taken away from these states would then need to be reallocated to states with relatively small numbers of noncitizens. The following ten states, the bulk of which lean Republican, would likely gain one House seat and thus one additional electoral vote: Iowa, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania.

Once all the accounting is done, the authors state that the GOP would gain a net four electoral votes if the illegal immigrants were not counted in the census. Remember that Al Gore lost the presidency in 2000 by only three electoral votes despite having the most votes.

The Politico article goes on to consider whether getting rid of the Electoral College is the remedy for this problem, although that could not be done before the election this year. Perhaps a better solution would be to not have millions of illegal immigrants residing in the USA.

The fact that we do have millions of illegal immigrants here points to the fact that our government has chosen to allow this for reasons which they decline to reveal to the American citizen. We can deduce that cheap labor is one of the obvious reasons. Another could be that there is always a push to legalize them and then they would be added onto the voting rolls and mostly on the Democrat side. Even if they never achieve citizenship, their children which are born here are citizens and they have also been shown to predominately lean Democrat.

You might say that the Electoral College advantage is just one more built in perk to a corrupted immigration system that favors the Democrat Party.

5 thoughts on “A hidden perk”

  1. Given the historical fact that 95% of the U.S. population in 1790 lived in places of less than 2,500 people, it is unlikely that the Founding Fathers were concerned about presidential candidates campaigning and winning only in big cities.

    None of the 10 most rural states (VT, ME, WV, MS, SD, AR, MT, ND, AL, and KY) is a battleground state.
    The current state-by-state winner-take-all method of awarding electoral votes does not enhance the influence of rural states, because the most rural states are not battleground states, and they are ignored. Their states’ votes were conceded months before by the minority parties in the states, taken for granted by the dominant party in the states, and ignored by all parties in presidential campaigns. When and where voters are ignored, then so are the issues they care about most.

    Support for a national popular vote is strong in rural states

    One-sixth of the U.S. population lives in the top 100 cities, and they voted 63% Democratic in 2004.

    One-sixth lives outside the nation’s Metropolitan Statistical Areas, and rural America voted 60% Republican.

    The remaining four-sixths live in the suburbs, which divide almost exactly equally.

  2. Maryland has enacted the National Popular Vote bill.

    By state laws, without changing anything in the Constitution, using the built-in method that the Constitution provides for states to make changes, the National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in the country.

    Every vote, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in every presidential election. No more distorting and divisive red and blue state maps of pre-determined outcomes. There would no longer be a handful of ‘battleground’ states where voters and policies are more important than those of the voters in 80%+ of the states, like Maryland, that have just been ‘spectators’ and ignored after the conventions.

    The National Popular Vote bill would take effect when enacted by states with a majority of the electoral votes—270 of 538.
    All of the presidential electors from the enacting states will be supporters of the presidential candidate receiving the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC)—thereby guaranteeing that candidate with an Electoral College majority.

    The bill has passed 34 state legislative chambers in 23 rural, small, medium, large, red, blue, and purple states with 261 electoral votes. The bill has been enacted by 11 jurisdictions with 165 electoral votes – 61% of the 270 necessary to go into effect.

    NationalPopularVote

  3. An election for President based on the nationwide popular vote would eliminate the Democrat’s advantage arising from the uneven distribution of non-citizens.

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