Also see below:     
California Democrats Push Popular Vote Measure    [

    Stacking the Electoral Deck
    The New York Times | Editorial

    Wednesday 22 August 2007

    The Electoral College should be abolished, but there is a right way to do it and a wrong way. A prominent Republican lawyer in California is doing it the wrong way, promoting a sneaky initiative that, in the name of Electoral College reform, would rig elections in a way that would make it difficult for a Democrat to be elected president, no matter how the popular vote comes out. If the initiative passes, it would do serious damage to American democracy.

    California currently gives all 55 of its electoral votes - the biggest electoral college prize in the nation - to the candidate who wins the statewide popular vote. Virtually all states use this winner-take-all method. The California initiative, which could go to a vote in June, would instead give the 2008 presidential candidates one electoral vote for every Congressional district that they win, with an additional two electoral votes going to whoever got the most votes statewide. (Democrats appear to have backed off from plans to try just as anti-democratic a trick in North Carolina, which is good.)

    The net result of the California initiative would be that if the Democratic candidate wins in that state next year, which is very likely, the Republican candidate might still walk away with 20 or more of the state's electoral votes. The initiative, backed by a shadowy group called Californians for Equal Representation, is being promoted as an effort to more accurately reflect the choices of the state's voters, and to force candidates to pay more attention to California, which is usually not in play in presidential elections. It is actually a power grab on behalf of Republicans.

    The Electoral College should be done away with, but in the meantime, any reforms should improve the system, not make it worse. If California abandons its winner-take-all rule while red states like Texas do not, it will be hard for a Democratic nominee to assemble an Electoral College majority, even if he or she wins a sizable majority of the popular vote. That appears to be just what the backers of the California idea have in mind.

    If voters understand that the initiative is essentially an elaborate dirty trick posing as reform, they are likely to vote against it. But judging by the misleading name of their organization, the initiative's backers want to fool the public into thinking the change would make elections more fair. They are planning on putting it to a vote in June 2008, an election when there will be few other things on the ballot, and turnout is expected to be extremely low. This bad-faith initiative is yet another example of the ways in which referenda can be used for mischief and a reminder of why they are a bad way to resolve complex public-policy issues.

    Opponents of the initiative announced yesterday that they are sponsoring their own, rival initiative, which would commit California to a national plan that aims to ensure that the winner of the national popular vote becomes president. That idea makes much more sense.

    Leading Republicans, including Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, have been silent about the initiative to split California's electoral votes, but they should be speaking out against it. The fight isn't about Republicans vs. Democrats. It is about whether to twist the nation's system of electing presidents to give one party an unfair advantage. No principled elected official, or voter, of either party should support that.

 

---

    Go to Original

    California Democrats Push Popular Vote Measure
    By Dan Morain
    The Los Angeles Times

    Wednesday 22 August 2007

The proposed initiative competes with a Republican effort to make the state's electoral vote system proportional.

    Sacramento - Democrats on Tuesday proposed putting on a 2008 ballot an initiative aimed at having California join the movement to elect presidents by popular vote.

    The initiative, if successful, also would head off a Republican effort to get some of California's electoral votes.

    GOP consultants have proposed a separate initiative to change California's winner-take-all system of awarding its 55 electoral votes. Under this measure, electoral votes would be awarded by how congressional districts vote, which could benefit the Republican nominee in this state with more registered Democrats.

    If the competing measures make it onto the ballot in June or November, California could become a battleground over the electoral college, whose electors ultimately select the president and vice president. The state has more electoral votes than any other and more than 10% of the electoral college's 538.

    Democrats backing the initiative filed Tuesday think that electing presidents by national popular vote would help the their party's nominee win the White House.

    "A lot of people who lived through the 2000 election. . . feel pretty strongly that we ought to have a national popular vote," said Democratic consultant Chris Lehane, among those pushing for the measure. "The electoral college is a vestige of another time period."

    In 2000, Democrat Al Gore received more of the popular vote than Republican George W. Bush, but failed to garner a majority of the electoral votes. Candidates who placed second in the popular vote also were elected president in 1888, 1876 and 1824.

    A team of Democrats filed two virtually identical initiatives with the California attorney general's office Tuesday, a first step to begin gathering the hundreds of thousands of signatures needed to place either measure on the June or November ballot. (One version contains a clause stating that if both the Democratic- and Republican-backed initiatives make it onto the ballot, the one with the most votes would take precedence.)

    If backers gather sufficient signatures to place one of the Democratic measures on the ballot, and voters were to approve it, California would become one of roughly a dozen states to have embraced the concept of electing presidents by popular vote.

    The national drive toward a popular vote would not scrap the electoral college system, but would require states to award their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the most actual votes nationally. It would take effect only if states representing a majority of the electoral votes agree to the change.

    Although California is a Democratic state, Republicans hold 19 congressional seats, suggesting that the GOP presidential nominee could win at least 19 of the state's electoral votes. A Field Poll released this week showed that the GOP-backed concept was supported by a ratio of 47% to 35%.

    There is no definitive count of voter registration by party. Some states don't ask party affiliation. But based on a recent Times/Bloomberg poll, 33% of voters nationally identified themselves as Democrats, 28% said they were Republicans, and the rest said they belonged to minor parties or declined to state.

    Kevin Eckery, spokesman for the GOP measure, said the Democratic-backed initiative would leave Californians with little or no voice in U.S. politics. "If you ignore the congressional districts, there would be one big overwhelming national vote," he said. "What matters in L.A. . . . won't matter. It will be just one vote thrown into the mix."

    ------------

    dan.morain@latimes.com