The platform
calls for the establishment of what can best be described as an electoral college of sorts for Texas statewide races. “The State Legislature shall cause to be enacted a State Constitutional Amendment to add the additional criteria for election to a statewide office to include the majority vote of the counties with each individual county being assigned one vote allocated to the popular majority vote winner of each individual county,” the new plank declared.
The proposal is born from the party’s fear that it will not rule Texas forever. Texas Republicans frequently tout their state’s economic growth in recent years and brag that residents in sapphire-blue states like California are fleeing there. But those migrations are
turning statewide races in the Lone Star State more competitive, and right-wing leaders in Texas fear that Democrats might once again hold the governorship and other key offices.
It is hard to imagine that such a system as the Texas GOP has proposed would comply with the one-person, one-vote principle, to put it lightly. Texas has 254 counties, some of which are extremely sparsely populated. Loving County, which is on the state’s western border with New Mexico, counted only 64 residents during the 2020 census, making it the least populous county in the United States. Eight Texas counties are home to fewer than 1,000 people, and an additional 86 counties each have fewer than 10,000 inhabitants.
Adopting a county-majority requirement for statewide elections would obviously cement Republicans into perpetual power in statewide races. In modern American politics, Democratic voters tend to be concentrated in urban areas while Republican voters are overwhelmingly popular in rural counties. President Joe Biden received 1.9 million votes just from the three Texas counties in 2020 that cover Houston, Dallas, and Austin.
Beyond the partisan implications, a county-majority requirement would dramatically shift the state’s electoral power toward its rural residents in general. Roughly 3.9 million people live in the least-populated half of Texas counties. They would enjoy an effective veto in statewide elections over the other 26 million or so Texans who live in denser areas. That proportion is similar to Texas’s population within the United States. If that power disparity were similarly reflected in the Electoral College, Texas would have an additional 229 electoral votes.
The Supreme Court has never ruled on whether such a system would be constitutional. Only one other state has ever adopted something like it. During its 1890 constitutional convention, Mississippi implemented a dual-track system of its own. It required candidates for statewide office to win a majority of the popular vote and a majority of districts in the state House of Representatives. If no candidate met both thresholds, the state House would elect them instead.
A person who is casually familiar with American history will have already guessed based on the year and the state that Mississippi’s 1890 system wasn’t created with good intentions. Those who participated in the convention openly declared that its purpose was to eliminate Black political power. “There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter,” Mississippi Governor James Vardaman, an ardent white supremacist,
recounted a few years later. “Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the n— from politics.”
