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Jordan Wood of Bristol serves as the executive director of democracyFIRST. He served as the chief of staff to a member of Congress, and as the vice president for political at End Citizens United.
In a time when politics is tearing neighbors and politics apart across the country, the “bluest” thing about Maine is our berries, the “reddest” our lobsters. We have a Republican U.S. senator, an independent U.S. senator and two Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives. We are informed and engaged. We actually talk to each other — and that makes our politics better, less extreme.
In choosing who to vote for, we are typically more interested in the person and what they stand for than in the color of the jersey they are wearing. Politics here is generally about improving people’s lives.
Further proof that we do things differently here: Maine allows each congressional district to assign its Electoral College vote for president to the candidate of its choosing. Nebraska is the only other state that uses this system, but partisan extremists are trying to change that.
In Nebraska, Trump-aligned Republicans are trying to exploit our even-handedness to tilt the playing field in their favor. They are trying to change the state’s Electoral College allocation rules so that the voices of voters in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, in and around Omaha, are swallowed up by the rest of the state.
The implications of this change could quite literally decide the outcome of the election. Nebraska’s last-minute change to “winner-take-all” could likely tip the balance in Trump’s favor and lead to a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College. In such a scenario, the presidency would be decided by the U.S. House, with each state delegation getting one vote. Even if Democrats win a House majority in November, Republicans will almost certainly control more state delegations than Democrats, which means this would hand the election to Trump.
Their explicit aim seems to be to not only to unfairly advantage their preferred nominee but, even worse, to engineer a deadlock in the Electoral College. In that case — a so-called contingent election in which no candidate for president wins 270 electoral votes — the cherished right of the people to elect the president would be taken over by the U.S. House. The voice of the voters would essentially be silenced, leaving it to the partisan insiders in Washington to select the next president. Chaos would inevitably ensue. And that is, in large part, the point.
Mainers can foil this plot.
You see, to pull off their power grab, these extremists are counting on Maine to do nothing. We are many things in Maine, but meek and submissive to national political extremists isn’t one of them. We won’t stand idly by while far-right partisans continue to subvert our democracy. It’s our time to stand up.
Maine’s political leaders must make it clear: We won’t stand for their “heads we win, tails you lose” swindle. We will stand together for American democracy by allowing our state to speak with one, unified voice in the presidential election this year should Nebraska’s extremists force a rule change.
Our governor and state legislators should rise to the challenge and publicly state we won’t let partisan extremists in Nebraska subvert our democracy. Make it clear to Nebraska that if it follows through with this plan, Maine can and will counteract that power grab by moving to a winner-take-all system thus neutralizing Donald Trump’s plot to unfairly gain an Electoral College vote.
A thoughtful, principled stand against extremists and cheats? No, it’s not common in our politics, but we do things a little differently here in Maine. The fate of our nation hangs in the balance, and there is no time to waste.