On September 12, Republican Governor Tom Corbett announced that Republicans plan to change the way Pennsylvaina's electoral vote is awarded. There are two problems the play will fix.
The GOP controls both houses of the legislature, so it can do what it wants.
In the past, there were always some moderate Republicans in Harrisburg who had some concerns about not damaging the democratic process. Today, it is hard to find real moderate Republicans there. People who were once moderate are drifting toward extremism and are as contemptuous of the democratic process as the Tea Baggers.
1) Democrats won the last five presidential elections in the Keystone State.
2) Democratic registrations outnumber those of Republicans by about a million. Of course, Democrats are more inclined to vote split tickets.
The plan is to award electoral votes on the basis of congressional distructs carried by each candidate. The state is being redistricted, and that will produce twelve Republican districts and six Democratic districts.
It could very well be that President Obama could again win the small majority of Pennsylvania votes and still get only one third of the electoral vote. This plan will make it quite a bit more difficult for Obama to be re-elected. Present calculations about how he could win reelection usually require him to garnere all 18 of the Pennsylvania voters.
It is undemocratic on the face of it, but voters, panicked over their future economic prospects, are moving to the right and will probably accept this new way of handling Pennsylvania's presidential elections.
The same panic explains why voters have accepted undemocratic tinkering with elections in 16 other states, that like Pennsylvaina, have Voter ID laws in place. These laws will prevent the poor and blacks from voting because they move more frequently within the same jurisdictions and do not bother to change voting addresses. They also are less likely to have photo IDs. These laws will also make it very difficult for college students to vote. Absentee voting will be tougher since one cannot just handle the whole process through the mails. Some of these states have shortened the periods for absentee voting because Democrats do a bit better than Republicans in early voting.
There is one possible negative effect. Senior advocaters say that 18% of old people lack proper voter IDs.
There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud, but still the public is not in an uproar about efforts to suppress voting. Just as people ar turning against entitlements because they thinik they mainly help the poor and blacks, so too they are willing to accept voter suppression that is clearly aimed at minorities.