My apologies if this has been diaried before, but I did a search and didn't see anything recent.
Via Political Wire, the National Journal has an article today on possible plans by Republicans to use their state-government control of reliably blue presidenitial-election states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin) to change these states' system of allocating electoral votes.
The only reason I can think of for Ohio or Florida not being included is that the GOP thinks it conceivably could win a presidential election in these states in the foreseeable future.
Under plans being considered, these states would award EV's just like Maine and Nebraska currently do: 1 for each congressional district won by a presidential candidate and 2 "bonus" EV's for winning the overall state vote.
According to the National Journal article, "Final election results show that Romney won nine of Michigan's 14 districts..." Hence, had the CD-based system been in effect this year (and putting aside, for now, the matter of how the parties might have developed different campaign strategies as a result), Romney would have received the majority of Michigan's EV's (9-7), despite the fact that Obama carried the state's popular vote by a decisive 9 percentage points!
Having a candidate who wins a state by 9 percentage points get fewer than half that state's EV's doesn't pass the giggle test, but I don't have much confidence that would stop the Republicans.
Other than winning back the governorships and state-legislative majorities in these states, and repealing the GOP's (potential) changes in EV allocation, I'm not sure what recourse the Democrats would have. The best deterrent would be for Democrats to have the capability to change the EV allocation in presidential red states, but as the article notes, the only current state where that's possible is low-EV West Virginia.
Any thoughts on how to combat this?