Whatever it takes, right? Donald Trump is attempting to manipulate Nebraska’s electoral vote allocation, true to the bald-faced supervillain face card he continually pulls.
The Republicans’ scramble does two things: It details the unnecessarily tangled complexity of an already profoundly problematic Electoral College, a pro-slavery machination. However, it also smacks of the kind of plot that smells of rank desperation, typically reserved for Saturday morning cartoons.
Nebraska’s unique system of allocating votes by congressional district—a quirk shared only with Maine—rests at the core of this nasty engineering. Republicans, understanding this to be a game of inches, saw that this peculiarity has allowed Democrats to consistently snag a single electoral vote from the more progressive Omaha area, the “blue dot” in the mostly conservative state. Now, with the rubbing of his grubby hands, Trump and his allies are working hard to switch Nebraska to a winner-take-all system, potentially securing all of the state’s electoral votes for their side.
Right out of central casting, enter Senator Lindsey Graham, playing the role of Krang to Trump’s Family Dollar Shredder in this Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-esque power grab. He has already committed various deeds of election tomfoolery, specifically in Georgia. “I want the law changed. I’ve made no qualms about it,” Graham, a critic-turned-enthusiastic Trump supporter, told the Washington Post.
“It’s not just about Nebraska,” Graham asserted before channeling Krang’s grandiose supervillain rhetoric. “It’s international consequences.” One can almost picture him gesticulating wildly in a buff, humanlike android body suit, eyes bulging with the false gravity and self-satisfaction of his words.
But why such a fuss over a single electoral vote? First, it’s because the Republicans know they are in trouble—a different kind of trouble today than when Biden was the Democratic candidate. Considering the expected tightness of this race, the change could mean (from the Republican point of view) the difference between Vice President Kamala Harris taking the necessary 270 electoral votes in an outright win versus a 269-269 tie that would tilt in Trump’s favor. A stalemate would force a vote with the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.
This maneuvering over the single vote underscores the broad absurdity of our country’s continued Electoral College system—what MSNBC’s Chris Hayes called a true Rube Goldberg machine.
Rube Goldberg machines, named after the American cartoonist, are gimmicky (and satirical) contraptions designed to perform simple tasks through ridiculously complex chains of events. Picture a marble rolling down a track, triggering a series of dominoes, which then activate a pulley system, all to simply turn on a lightbulb. Sound familiar? It should, because that’s essentially how the Electoral College operates in practice.
Instead of a straightforward nationwide popular vote, we have a weirdly (and purposefully) Byzantine system of state-by-state contests, varying allocation methods, and the wild card of faithless electors. The fact that Graham and Trump are expending so much energy on a single vote from Nebraska is a testament to this unnecessary complexity.
The desperation evident in the GOP’s maneuvers suggests a party existentially aware that demographic shifts and changing voter preferences may be tilting in such a direction that could tomb them for the foreseeable future. Rather than adapting their platform or expanding their appeal, they’ve resorted to placing those leftover nuts and bolts into the electoral machinery itself—a strategy that feels more at home in a villainous lair. As it stands, the vote could come down to a single person, Republican state senator Mike McDonnell.
As this political theater unfolds, voters are left to wonder: Is this really the best way to choose the leader of the free world? Or did we allow our leaders to perpetrate a dirty system so painfully complicated and ripe for manipulation that it resembles a cartoon villain’s elaborate trap more closely than a cornerstone of democracy?
With Graham and Trump playing the roles of bumbling antagonists, the question looms: Isn’t it time we simplified this contraption and returned to the basic principle of one person, one vote? Or will we continue to let our democracy operate like a convoluted Saturday morning cartoon plot, where the nation’s fate hinges on nefarious characters capable of manipulating individual cogs in an unnecessarily complex machine?
Published: Sep 23, 2024 02:05 pm