Winner Take All

Last Wednesday was a very busy day at the Capitol in Lincoln. Every State Senator's phone and email lit up with messages concerning LB 764, a bill commonly referred to as the "Winner Take All" bill. Nebraska is one of only two states which splits its electoral college votes during a presidential election. Current Nebraska State law allows voters to choose one presidential elector for each of Nebraska's three congressional districts and for two additional presidential electors to be chosen at large. Sen. Loren Lippincott's bill, LB 764, would change it so that the presidential candidate receiving the most votes statewide would receive all five presidential electors in the electoral college.

With only six legislative days remaining in the 2024 legislative session, former President Donald Trump decided to try to change Nebraska's election laws to favor a "Winner Take All" system. With help from Gov. Jim Pillen, U.S. Sen. Pete Ricketts, and conservative radio talk show host, Charlie Kirk, calls went out for constituents to contact their State Senators, asking them to advance LB 764. There was just one problem: LB 764 was already dead.

LB 764 was deader than a door nail. Sen. Lippincott's bill had never advanced out of the Government, Military and Veterans Affairs Committee to which it had been assigned. No vote by the committee members had ever been requested by Sen. Lippincott because he knew that he did not have enough votes to advance the bill out of committee. So, the bill had already effectively died in committee.

LB 764 had no path forward. Adding insult to injury was the fact that the bill had no priority status. No State Senator had declared LB 764 as his or her priority bill. Because the bill never advanced out of committee, Sen. Lippincott never recommended the bill as a Speaker priority bill. The Speaker of the Legislature gets to declare 25 bills as Speaker priority bills every year. Since the bill did not have enough votes to advance out of committee, the bill could not become a committee priority bill for the Government, Military and Veterans Affairs committee. Even if the bill had advanced out of committee, without a priority status, LB 764 would have gone to the back of the line behind 230 other bills waiting to be debated on the floor of the Legislature. With only five days remaining, and three rounds of debate required, the chances of this happening were zero.

Sen. Julie Slama to the rescue! Wednesday afternoon, Sen. Julie Slama of Dunbar rode into the Legislature's Norris Chamber like the cavalry ready to save the day with an amendment in hand. Sen. Slama's strategy was to amend the contents of her former bill from 2022, LB 76, into Sen. Beau Ballard's personal priority bill, LB 1300. There was just one question remaining: Was Sen. Slama's amendment germane to the bill? In order for an amendment to be germane to a bill it must address the same subject matter as the bill.

Sen. Eliot Bostar of Lincoln challenged Sen. Slama's amendment, AM 3339, on the grounds that it was not germane to the subject matter of LB 1300, a bill designed to prepare Nebraska's supply chain and critical infrastructure for the potential outbreak of a military conflict in the Pacific Rim. The presiding officer sided with Sen. Bostar and declared that the amendment was not germane to the bill. Sen. Slama moved to override the decision of the presiding officer, but the vote failed. I was one of only eight Senators who voted unsuccessfully with Sen. Slama to override the decision of the presiding officer.

Finally, in a last effort on Friday to save the movement, some considered amending "Winner Take All" into Sen. John Lowe's bill, LB 541, a bill that would make power district elections partisan. The "Winner Take All" amendment was germane to Sen. Lowe's bill and the bill had already advanced to Select File, so it seemed like a good fit. However, there was just one problem: Sen. Lowe did not have enough votes to advance his bill to Final Reading without the "Winner Take All" amendment attached to it. Adding the amendment would have only made the bill even more difficult to advance. So, the "Winner Take All" idea finally died at the end of last week.

I believe the majority of Nebraskans would like to switch back to a "Winner Take All" system when it comes to voting for presidential electors to the electoral college. Unfortunately, the legislative session is quickly coming to a close, all of the available options for the Legislature have now run out, and the idea will have to wait for another legislative session or even a special session. In the meantime, Nebraskans may still give all of their electors to a single presidential candidate when the voters in all three congressional districts vote for the same person.