Primary season is upon us and already Republicans have given the nod to a hoax-promoting insurrectionist as their aspirational Senate candidate in Pennsylvania while a notorious "tea party" crank was the party's vehicle for toppling Idaho's Republican attorney general. (That attorney general's crime: not being willing to help nullify Donald Trump's election loss based on seditionist hoaxes.)
The Republican gubernatorial primary in Colorado won't be held until June 28, however, and that one looks to be another humdinger. Republican Greg Lopez appears to be doing his best to represent every Republican vice at once, including the parts where each candidate proposes radically changing foundational aspects of our democracy based on ideas they had while on the toilet.
As reported by 9News, Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Lopez thinks the current plan of having Colorado voters vote for statewide candidates and then counting those votes is to implement a rewards-based "electoral college" where every county in the state gets at least three electors, regardless of population, but can be rewarded with up to 11 electors based on their voter turnout percentages.
The Daily Kos Elections Team talks with Joe Sudbay about the big primaries and all of the redistricting nonsense on The Downballot podcast
Got a high voter turnout? Your county gets 11 electoral votes. Have an enormous population but not good turnout? Sorry, your county won't be getting as many votes.
I'm sure at some point this sounded like a fine plan, and in almost exactly the same way that things Elon Musk dreams up while high sound like great plans. (What if instead of having traffic, we have traffic in tunnels? And with that, the day is saved.) But much like Musk's versions, the problems should be immediately apparent after you've had a chance to sleep things off.
Giving every county the same number of votes regardless of population blatantly violates our democratic principles as currently (this week) understood because that means a county of 1,000 residents gets the same state representation as, say, Denver.
And if those 1,000 rural residents vote more consistently than those of more populated counties do, then now they have more representation than any of Colorado's actual population centers.
A 9News calculation of the results estimates that Lopez's plan has skewed the last governor's race by nearly 30 points in the Republican direction, turning a solid Democratic win into an absolute drubbing at the hands of the less popular Republican. On the ground, the results of Lopez's plan would be so manifestly ridiculous that it sounds like a joke:
"Lopez’s weighting system would have given the 2,013 combined voters in Hinsdale, Kiowa and Mineral counties a total of 33 electoral votes, more than double the 14 electoral votes of Denver, Arapahoe and Adams counties’ combined 761,873 voters."
Whether Lopez just didn't think this through or whether he thought it through plenty and just (cough) happened to chose a plan that would give vacant rangeland more representation in government than actual people is for now a mystery, except that Republican politicians keep proposing plans to strip American cities of representation and hand it over to conservative rural areas instead. Funny that.
Anyhoo, we are likely to hear more from Lopez in the month between now and the Colorado primaries, and not in a good way. Lopez got positively bodied when facing the same 9News reporter for an extended interview. It was an interview in which reporter Kyle Clark asked how he squared his hard-hard-right abortion views with his arrest for "violently assaulting your then-pregnant wife." Defending himself, Lopez reminded his interviewer that he and his wife "were both arrested for assault," not just him, and that he isn't Jesus, after all.
I have always, always hated that line. A religious zealot gets caught after doing something absolutely horrible and feigns outrage about how obviously he's not Jesus Himself. The "nobody’s perfect" defense.
"Mr. Lopez, you were arrested after a series of brutal serial killings and in your house they found 14 half-eaten corpses. When police arrived you were chewing on a human foot."
"Well excuse me, mister judge-a-lot. I never claimed to be perfect. I'm not Jesus, who I love and who is my savior. The Bible says that you shouldn't judge people—can you pass the mustard, please?—so if you ask me the one doing the most sinning around here is you."
See, there's quite a bit of zone between "literally Jesus Christ" and, say, "I ate 14 people," and quite a bit of that zone still falls into "not a mass murderer, but probably also not the best person to put in a position of significant power." We do get to judge, and voters do get to decide whether or not they want you, personally, explaining morality to them if you've got a past history that suggests you might not be entirely trustworthy with such things!
This is, of course, just one of the reasons Republicans are now filled to the brim with ideas about which American votes should count more and which ones should count only a little or not at all. The next obvious Republican revision will be to declare that from now on only Jesus Himself can vote against them. He gets all the electoral votes and you get none. Oh, but he's on the phone and he says the Republicans win.