'Nightmare': Columnist warns Republicans' electoral college plot could undo U.S. democracy

A quiet midwestern congressional district represents a more serious threat to American democracy than the bullets flying at the former president or the lies about Haitian immigrants flying out of his running mate's mouth, a new political analysis contends.

Nebraska Republicans are playing a complicated political game with Douglas County election rules that the Guardian columnist Stephen Marche warned Thursday could deliver their political party a "dangerous" win.

"The sheer boredom of what I’m describing here, the banal technicalities of the complex legal structures in place, may, on the surface, seem less frightening than assassination attempts and bomb threats and cooked pets," Marche wrote.

"But don’t misunderstand: this is the real danger America faces. The complexity is the trap."

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The complexity Marche warns against pertains to an electoral college quirk in Maine and Nebraska, the two lone states that can split votes between candidates by allocating two votes to the popular vote winner then one vote per congressional district winners.

Four out of five of Nebraska's five congressional districts consistently vote Republican but Douglas County — home to the city of Omaha – has been voting reliably Democrat for years, Marche noted.

It's a district that could deliver Vice President Kamala Harris the 2024 presidential election — and one a powerful state Republican lawmaker said this month he could try to take back, the analysis contends.

Gov. Jim Pillen last week said he was willing to reconvene the Legislature to change Nebraska election policy to deliver all its electoral votes to the popular vote winner — likely to be former President Donald Trump.

This, Marche argued, presents a danger to American democracy regardless of whether Nebraska Republicans succeed in reclaiming Omaha County.

"They only need to muddy the waters," Marche wrote. "If, for example, the Nebraska legislature ensured that their electoral college votes were in dispute, and the courts had not decided the matter by 6 January, and no one had reached the threshold of 270, that state of affairs would automatically trigger a contingent election. In a contingent election, another abstruse mechanism of the US electoral system, each state delegation, whether it’s California or Wyoming, gets a single vote, which means that the Republicans would always win."

This is the complex mechanism Marche admitted is boring, but also important.

"The complexity makes it easy for people to believe that somehow they haven’t been tricked, that a functioning democratic system, however bizarre, is still in place, even when it clearly isn’t anymore," March wrote.

"It goes without saying that the nightmare I’ve described here – which could absolutely happen – is only one of several glitches in the electoral system which could undo the United States. (Georgia is a whole other nightmare.) The Republicans have set themselves up to maximize incoherence, exactly because they are aware of the vulnerability of the system."