Still reeling from their presidential election loss, Republicans across the country would be well served by a period of self-reflection. They might wonder why Americans broadly rejected them and their ideas, or ask themselves what campaign tactics could help them succeed in the future.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. Rather than examine themselves, Republicans choose to see our actual elections system as the problem. They wish to alter the way our president gets elected so the system itself would be more biased toward their chosen candidate.

Forty-eight of fifty states award electoral points based on a winner-take-all system. There are problems with this system, and some support changing it so the president is elected by a national popular vote. But Republicans are pushing in a very different direction.

They propose that critical swing states start awarding electors by congressional district. This favors the minority candidate because, although a statewide majority might favor one candidate, individual districts will prefer another.

This would create a victory where before there was a total loss.

Just look at Virginia. President Barack Obama won the state by nearly four percentage points in 2012, awarding him all 13 of Virginia’s electors. However, he won in only four of Virginia’s 11 congressional districts. Following the new system – which has been passed in the Virginia State Senate – Mitt Romney would have been awarded seven electors, and Obama only six.

Evidently this plan would have completely flipped the result in Virginia.

The justification for the move in Virginia has been quite telling. Republican State Sen. Charles Carrico said the plan “is necessary because Virginia’s urbanized areas can outvote rural regions, weakening their political strength.”

In other words, a minority of rural, conservative voters should count more than a majority of their urban and suburban counterparts.

Not just wayward Republican state legislators are pushing the plan. The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, said it is something that certain states “ought to be looking at.”

The idea has been suggested in six states this year: Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida. Though geographically disparate, these are all states the Romney campaign had hoped to win but failed to do so.

Furthermore, each of these states is controlled entirely by Republicans on the state level, giving them the power they need to make these changes, according to the Constitution.

But there’s another important factor – these same Republican state governments also get to draw the congressional lines. This would, effectively, allow the legislatures in these states to choose which party gets the majority of electors from their state by gerrymandering district lines.

This plan would make our elections less democratic, putting outsized control in state governments.

If electoral reform is what Republicans want, let’s do it. But instead of redrawing districts, we should be offering elections on more than one day, so working people don’t have to choose between paying their bills and exercising their rights. We should move to a national popular vote, so a few swing states can’t decide an election for the whole country.

We absolutely should not be manipulating the system so a losing party can win using a legal loophole.

Colin Crowley is a senior political science and philosophy major. His column appears online weekly. He can be reached at cocrowle@syr.edu and followed on Twitter at @colincrowley.

Published on January 31, 2013 at 3:05 am