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One of the more remarkable responses to Donald Trumps loss in the 2020 presidential election has been the vilification not of voter fraud but, instead, of voting.

Because Trump claimed that the election had been tainted by rampant fraud and because no evidence of fraud emerged, many of his allies scrambled to find a middle ground in which they could claim that the election was somehow suspect without having to amplify those claims. Many settled on the idea that the election was unfair because states had expanded voting mechanisms because of the pandemic.

These arguments often centered on exaggerated or untrue claims that these expansions violated state constitutions. But they also shared another quality: They were complaints that too many people voted. Sometimes these criticisms were at least layered with hand-wringing that, say, ballot drop boxes allowed for more fraudulent votes to be cast, which is not true. Often, though, they were just complaints that it was too easy to cast a ballot and, by extension, that too many legitimate voters were able to cast votes for Joe Biden.

This line of rhetoric (which is omnipresent once you start noticing it) is a reflection of the Republican Partys long-standing apathy about the process of submitting issues to voters and tallying their responses. The electoral college has been hailed by the right as not only necessary but wise, even though it can award the presidency to the less-popular candidate (as it did for the Republican nominees in 2000 and 2016). Republicans have trotted out the hoary, overstated dichotomy between democracy and republicanism; some, like Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), went on to try to help Trump retain power despite losing the 2020 election.

Over the weekend in Texas, the state Republican Party offered up perhaps the most explicit example of separating election results from actual voting. At its convention, the party proposed and its delegates approved a platform demanding that winning statewide office necessitate also winning at least half of Texas counties.

The endorsement of a constitutional amendment mandating that criterion will almost certainly not result in it being implemented and, even if it was, it would probably face significant legal challenges. But that this is considered a viable approach to distributing power among the leaders of the states largest political party is remarkable.

Its worth fleshing out how ridiculous the idea is. For one thing, there are a lot of very big, very empty counties in Texas, which has 254 such subdivisions. The 127 least-populous counties are home to about 916,000 people, a total that is only 3 percent of the statewide population. There are seven counties that, by themselves, have more residents than those 127 counties. But even if a candidate won all seven of those counties (and the 14.8 million people who live in them), she could be defeated if her opponent won those 127 smallest counties and one more. And that means a Republican: Those smallest counties backed Trump by an average of 59 percentage points in 2020.

The proposed amendment would apply only to statewide offices, so lets consider the 2022 gubernatorial contest between Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and former congressman Beto ORourke (D). Abbott won 235 counties, 107 more than he needed to secure a majority of counties won.

The distribution of the county-level vote margins in that contest looked like this:

But that misrepresents the number of residents in each county. If we scale the circles by total votes cast, you can see that the election was closer than the chart above might suggest (though Abbott still won handily).

If we adjust the results so that the Democrat ORourke won by one vote (adding Democratic votes across counties to match the statewide distribution), we get a result that looks like the chart below. ORourke gets more votes but is still 98 counties short of a majority of counties won.

Because rural areas of Texas (and the broader United States) are more heavily White, the proposed rules effect is to provide an enormous advantage to White Texans. In the scenario above where ORourke wins, about three-quarters of the states non-White population lives in the counties where he prevails. But according to the proposed constitutional amendment, the winner would be the Republican who prevailed in the majority of counties, counties where a majority of the states White population lives.

There is a reason that county-level apportionment was used in the Jim Crow-era South, as historian Kevin Kruse noted over the weekend.

If Texas Republicans embrace this return to a county-unit type of system, he wrote, theyll actually have created something even more unequal than the scheme concocted by segregationists of a century ago.

How many Democratic votes would we need to add for ORourke to win a majority of counties? About 14.2 million in an election where 8.1 million votes were cast.

If we transfer votes from Abbott to ORourke, that number drops, but the point remains: The ability of a Democrat to win statewide office in the state would be significantly hobbled under the scenario proposed by the Republican Party. Which, of course, is the point.

Again, this will not be effected. But it is worth considering for the light it sheds on other efforts from the party, such as the backlash against expansions of voting access in 2020 or protectionist views of how the electoral college and Senate allocate power. Thats particularly true when considering why Texas Republicans think this is important now: because the party is at increasing risk of losing statewide elections. The 2020 presidential margin in the state was the narrowest since President Bill Clintons 1996 reelection.

If voting isnt securing you the power you seek, you can try harder to win votes. Or you can change the rules so that power isnt as securely tied to voters.

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Analysis | The Texas GOP takes the party's hostility to democracy to a new level - The Washington Post

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