Sunday, November 4, 2007

Highjacking of California electorate not a dead issue afterall

Awhile back I posted about the efforts of a small group of "right-wing GOP donors and political consultants (several with close ties to Rudy Giuliani)" to hink around with California's electoral votes' system. Basically what they want to do is to tie electoral votes to specific districts, based on the vote outcomes in tha district. What this could in effect do is pull as many as 20 electoral votes from Democrat to republican. Currently, under California law, whoever wins the most votes in the state, get all of the electoral votes. The new Republican plan would split that.

It had been my understanding that these attempts had failed. Evidently not yet.
The group that hatched this ballot idea is currently trying to gather enough signatures to qualify for the June ballot. There is alot of right-wing Republican money being poured into this effort. Those 20 electoral votes are enough to sway the presidential election. Currently, Governor Schwarzengger hasn't said whether he endorses the measure or not, but he has expressed some reservations. He doesn't like the idea of changing the rules "midgame". I would agree with that.

Throughout this whole thing it has very much smacked of gerrymandering and, in the words of Arnold, "attempting to change the rules of the game in the middle of it because you don't think you can win under the current rules". More attention needs to be paid to this whole thing. While I'm not one to buy into the whole "election cancelled/martial law" yell of doom-thinking, it is fair to say that not only are the Republicans desparate, they have, on plenty of occassions, played the rules and the game to fit their own ends, legal or not.

1 comment:

Trouble said...

It looks like the Republicans will do anything to stay at the top, seems more like a money war to me. This is the first Ive heard of this, Guess I need to start keeping up with the political news.