NPR ran a story about the GOP wanting a piece of California’s electoral votes. Thought it was dead? No way. The Rethugs want it all, and they want it forever. Can’t get a permanent majority through gerrymandering and vote fraud? Easy, just cheat the Dems out of a 55 electoral vote advantage.
There is a huge political battle raging in California that is viewed as either a much needed quest for electoral reform or an attempt to steal the presidential election.
Republicans are backing a proposed ballot initiative that would change the way California allocates its Electoral College votes. Right now, the statewide winner gets all 55. The proposed initiative would instead award two votes to the winner of each congressional district.
A few weeks ago, it appeared the campaign for the initiative was dead. Backers had raised no money to pay for gathering signatures. Ultimately, the initiative’s organizers walked away.
But the initiative itself was still on the books, and an entirely new crew of supporters took it up.
I wonder why that is? Clearly somebody has realized that by taking that 55 electoral vote advantage away from the Dems and reducing it to say, three, that the GOP would assuredly never lose the White House. Ever. Again, it’s too valuable a GOP weapon to waste. That’s why it’ll be back again and again and again.
“We said we thought it would be the Freddy Krueger of initiatives and come back to life, and, indeed, at some level it has,” says Democratic consultant Chris Lehane, who’s spearheading the effort to defeat the measure.
But the prize offered by the Electoral College initiative was just too tantalizing for Republicans to let it fade away, he says.
“It would effectively give Republicans between 20 and 22 Electoral College votes, essentially handing them a state the size of Ohio, which would make it virtually impossible — or at least extremely difficult — for a Democrat to be able to win in 2008, even if that Democrat wins the majority vote,” Lehane says.
But the initiative has nothing to do with partisan advantage, says Dave Gilliard, who is managing the initiative. Theoretically, Democrats could benefit, too.
For instance, in 1988 Michael Dukakis won 48 percent of the votes in California, he says, so it does not make sense for either party to be in favor of a winner-take-all system.
But in California politics, 1988 is a long time ago. In the past four presidential elections, California has become reliably Democratic. So, presidential candidates usually come here just to raise money and that’s about it.
Does anybody on Earth believe this? Why isn’t NPR calling complete bullshit on this? It’s a scam to gerrymander the presidential election in favor of the GOP, to give them an unbeatable advantage. Period.
Note that the GOP isn’t trying to get this done to any other state. By having the California GOP do it with the excuse “Now candidates will campaign here” its nothing more than a shabby ruse.
Now again, people knew it was a shabby ruse and the initiative was dead on arrival.
So why did it come back? Who revived it? Club For Growth? Family Research Council? Karl Rove?
Nope.
Unlike the first campaign for the initiative, this one has money to spend. A large share of the credit for that goes to one of the Republican operatives who revived the measure, Anne Dunsmore.
Dunsmore was Rudolph Giuliani’s chief fundraiser until she left the campaign in September. Other movers and shakers backing the measure have also been tied to Giuliani or to the co-chair of his campaign in California.
Campaign Denies Connection
Lehane thinks Giuliani is trying to give himself an advantage in the state if he becomes the Republican presidential nominee. All the connections between Giuliani and the initiative cannot be a coincidence, Lehane says. Opponents of the measure have filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission.
But Giuliani’s campaign says there is no connection between the candidate and the measure.
“The campaign had no knowledge and no involvement in this effort, and we’d be fine leaving it as it is. California is a state that Mayor Giuliani puts into play in the general election regardless of what rules are in place,” Maria Comella, the Giuliani campaign’s deputy communications director, says in a written statement.
Yep, good ol Nine Eleven Man(tm) himself. Nice guy, huh? Plausible deniability and the power to steamroll the Dems into a ditch. The GOP can’t win a fair election, so they change the rules so that they can win. They do it because that’s the only way they can do it now.
The saving grace is this would be on the ballot in 2008, meaning it wouldn’t affect anything until 2012, and there’s a major chance the ballot will fail.
But with a lock on the oval office if this passes, how many dirty ticks are we going to see on this vote? We already know the GOP is willing to steal Presidential elections. Will they steal this one too?
