Anti-Electoral College Group Hopes To Fight Winner-Take-All System At SCOTUS

By STEVE LeBLANC | March 26, 2018 1:28 pm

BOSTON (AP) — When Donald Trump won more than 52 percent of the Texas vote during the 2016 election, he pocketed all 38 of that state’s Electoral College votes just as Hillary Clinton, who won California with 61 percent of the vote, swept up all 55 of that state’s electors.

It’s a winner-take-all system used by 48 states that critics hope to have ultimately ruled unconstitutional.

Advocates took their first step last month by filing federal lawsuits in four states — Massachusetts, Texas, California and South Carolina — arguing that the practice of assigning all of a state’s Electoral College votes to the popular winner, no matter how narrow, runs counter to the principle of “one person, one vote” by disenfranchising those who voted for the losing candidate.

The group behind the initiative, the League of United Latin American Citizens, said the practice also violates the constitutional rights of free association, political expression and equal protection under the law.

Luis Vera, an attorney for the group, pointed to the Texas election, arguing that those who backed Clinton essentially saw their votes disappear.

“When that vote actually gets to the Electoral College, it’s just thrown away. It’s counted simply to be thrown away,” he said. “In California, it was the opposite.”

Vera said the group deliberately chose two Democratic-leaning states and two Republican-leaning states — Clinton won about 61 percent of the vote in Massachusetts, while Trump won about 55 percent in South Carolina — to argue that the winner-take-all system harms voters of both parties.

They also drafted local residents to serve as plaintiffs, including actor and comedian Paul Rodriguez, a Republican, in California. In Massachusetts, the group tapped former Republican Gov. William Weld, who made a cameo appearance in the 2016 election as vice presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party.

Their goal is to get the question eventually before the U.S. Supreme Court — a long, uncertain road with no guarantee that the high court would even agree to hear the case, let alone rule in their favor.

The group is hoping to pressure states to adopt a more proportional distribution of Electoral College votes.

Under that system, for instance, Trump would get 52 percent of the 38 electors in Texas, while Clinton, who garnered about 44 percent of the Texas vote, would get about 44 percent of the electors. The remainder would go to third-party candidates who reached a threshold or be divvied up among the major-party candidates, again based on the percentage of their vote.

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