Dec 17, 2012 3 min read

HARRISBURG – Pennsylvania’s 20 members of the Electoral College carried out their duties as expected Monday, unanimously voting to make President Barack Obama’s re-election official, and some seized the opportunity to bash the Republican opposition one last time.

In a 90-minute ceremony in the state House of Representatives chamber that was matched in the 49 other states, the Pennsylvania party activists and elected officials who were nominated as electors by the Obama campaign before the Nov. 6 election cast separate paper ballots for Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.

Obama, a Democrat, won all of the state’s 20 electoral votes when he defeated Republican nominee Mitt Romney in the state by about 310,000 votes, out of more than 5.7 million ballots cast.

Several electors praised the evolution of the Electoral College as instrumental in ensuring peaceful transfers of power between the major political parties when the presidency changes hands.

“We are not here because one party failed, we are here because the system succeeded,” Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican, said in a brief speech.

But some electors singled out for criticism last year’s unsuccessful attempt by some Republicans to change the method of awarding Pennsylvania’s electors, a move that likely would give at least some electors to the GOP candidate in a state Democrats have carried in every presidential election going back to 1992.

Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi, R-Delaware, advocated replacing the winner-take-all policy used by 48 states with a formula that would give two electors to the statewide winner and award the other electors based on results in each of the state’s 18 congressional districts.

Pittsburgh lawyer Clifford B. Levine, a longtime Obama ally who served as president of Monday’s gathering, said the proposal would have given Romney more electoral votes in Pennsylvania than Obama, even though Obama won the statewide popular vote by more than 5 percentage points.

“That result would have defied our constitutional principles and undermined the basic premise of fair and free elections – that the candidate who receives the most votes shall prevail,” said Levine, who did not mention Pileggi’s name in his speech.

Democratic state Treasurer Rob McCord, an elector, said the proposal amounted to “funny business with the Electoral College itself” that he considered “outside the bounds of what’s right.”

Pileggi has said he plans to introduce a new version of his proposal next year. The proposal would award two electoral votes to the statewide winner of the popular vote and apportion the remaining 18 votes based on the percentage of the statewide vote each candidate received.

Pileggi’s spokesman, Erik Arneson, said the latest bill will address concerns raised about the original plan.

“Mr. Levine and others who seek to maintain the status quo continue to focus on the old proposal because they understand that the new one would reflect the will of the voters much more fairly than the current winner-take-all system,” Arneson said.