Virginia Republicans, responding to their silencing in last year's presidential election, seek to rewrite how their state assigns its electoral votes. Like 47 other states and the District of Columbia, Virginia gives all of its votes to the presidential candidate with the highest share of the statewide popular vote. The new plan would toss this method and assign votes based on results within congressional districts. The winner of the most districts would receive the last two electoral votes. Had this been in place last year, Barack Obama would have won four electoral votes to Mitt Romney's nine, rather than taking all thirteen. This is tragic. In George Allen's Real Virginia, Barack Obama got no support, and these legislators have offered only a middling correction that would still have let Obama walk with nearly one-third of Virginia's electoral votes.
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