A Republican candidate for governor of Colorado wants to be elected via a statewide electoral college
Behind the candidate’s odd, unconstitutional proposal to make states into republics of their counties
Greg Lopez, a Republican former mayor running for governor of Colorado, said this week that if he is elected in November he would immediately move to replace the state’s popular-vote system with a system that assigns electoral votes to counties based on the voter turnout of their residents. Each county would get between 3 and 11 votes in a statewide electoral college, with the precise number determined by the share of residents in that county that voted in the last election.
To state the obvious: this is an incredibly bad idea.
Lopez’s state electoral-college system would have the dual effect of punishing voters who live in cities, via malapportionment of too many votes to rural counties, and hurting voters where turnout is lower — a dubious principle to base an electoral system on
According to a recording of the campaign stop where he unearthed his proposal, Lopez said: “One of the things that I’m going to do, and I’ve already put this plan together, i…
