-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: August 11, 2007 11:42:28 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: More Early Steps to Rig the 2008 Election
Thanks to Republicans in 2000, 2004 & 2006, American voters no
longer trust elections to be fair. If things get any worse, they
may make their voices heard the old-fashioned way: "BULLETS, not
Ballots, in 2008."
States Try to Alter
How Presidents Are Elected
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
New York Times, August 11, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/11/us/politics/11vote.html?
_r=2&th&emc=th&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
LOS ANGELES, Aug. 10 — When state Democratic leaders from around
the country meet this weekend in Vermont, the California chairman,
Art Torres, expects to be peppered with the sort of questions that
have been clogging his in-box for weeks.
What is this about Republicans trying to change the way Electoral
College votes are allocated in California? Is there a countereffort
by Democrats in the works? What does it mean for presidential
candidates?
Frustrated by a system that has marginalized many states in the
presidential election process, or seeking partisan advantage, state
lawmakers, political party leaders and voting rights advocates
across the country are stepping up efforts to change the rules of
the game, even as the presidential campaign advances.
In California, this has led to a nascent Republican bid to
apportion the state’s electoral votes by Congressional district,
not by statewide vote, in a move that most everyone agrees would
benefit Republican candidates. Democrats in North Carolina are
mulling a similar move, because it would help Democrats there.
In more than a dozen states, the efforts have also led to a game of
leapfrog in the scheduling of presidential primary and caucus
dates. Most recently, on Thursday, Republicans in South Carolina
moved their primary to January from February to get ahead of
Florida’s.
Further, there is a germinal movement to effectively abolish the
Electoral College, awarding the White House instead to the winner
of the national popular vote. Maryland recently became the first
state to have such legislation passed and then signed into law,
although legislatures in several other states have passed similar
measures.
“There are different political fires all over the place,” Mr.
Torres said. “We felt before that we would try and maintain some
order and discipline, but it has been difficult to do. This all
portends a strong initiative by states to exert more power.”
Each maneuver, which experts on electoral politics agree could
radically change the political landscape or, just as easily,
completely wash out, has added a generous dose of unpredictability
to an already knotty federal election season.
“You have to be watchful of what is happening,” said Bill Burton, a
spokesman for Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. “It’s a
reality that we have to deal with, but the people on the ground
have their heads down and are working as hard as they can.”
The states’ efforts reflect a momentum outside Washington to “get a
system that reflects public preferences,” said George C. Edwards
III, a professor of political science at Texas A&M University.
Elected officials, state party leaders and many voters have grown
weary of a system in which “candidates focus on 13 or 14 states and
no other states get attention, except for fund-raising,” Professor
Edwards said.
In 2004, 13 states with 159 electoral votes among them were
considered “in play,” according to FairVote, a voting rights
organization; in 1988, there were 21 such states and 272 electoral
votes.
The interest in changing the way the president is elected was
largely seeded by Democrats after the 2000 election, but has since
been embraced by Republicans as well.
“We have discovered what our founding fathers learned as well,
which is that you can manipulate election outcomes by setting those
rules,” said Michael P. McDonald, an associate professor of
government and politics at George Mason University.
In the last legislative session, lawmakers in eight states
considered bills that would give their electoral votes to the
winner of the national popular vote rather than the presidential
candidate chosen by state voters; the measures would take effect
only if states representing a majority of the 538 electoral votes
made the same change.
“The idea of the states banding together and being able to set the
rules of the game to directly elect the president is a new idea,”
said Pete Maysmith, the national director of state campaigns for
Common Cause, which advocates a national popular vote. “And I think
it is grabbing people’s attention and gaining momentum.”
Far more potentially significant in the near term, however, is a
recent move by the lawyer for the California Republican Party to
ask voters in a ballot measure to apportion electoral votes by
Congressional district. With numerous safe Republican districts
around the state, this change could represent roughly 20 electoral
votes for a Republican candidate who would otherwise presumably
lose the entire state, which has been reliably Democrat in recent
presidential elections.
“We think it is the most effective way of having California count,”
said Kevin Eckery, a spokesman for the ballot effort, the
Presidential Election Reform Act. “Candidates love California in
the spring when they come out to raise money. But after that, as
long as California is not in play, it tends to be ignored.”
Mr. Eckery said that polling on the issue would cost $300,000 to
$500,000, and gaining enough signatures to get the initiative on
the June 2008 state ballot would cost a few million dollars more.
Fund-raising has already begun, and proponents and opponents of the
measure believe the effort will attract ample donors.
While assigning electoral votes by Congressional district is a
movement lacking broad national support, both Republicans and
Democrats agreed that if the effort by California Republicans gain
steam, other states might consider it as well. Only Maine and
Nebraska currently use such a system.
Had the electoral votes been allocated by Congressional district
nationwide in 2000, President Bush’s electoral margin of victory
would have been just over 7 percent, or eight times his take that
year, according to FairVote.
If the California measure succeeds, “it would make it impossible
for a Democrat to win the White House” in a close election,
predicted Steve Schmidt, a Republican consultant who ran Gov.
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s most recent campaign in California and has
been an adviser to the presidential campaign of Senator John
McCain, Republican of Arizona.
Democrats and other interest groups have already promised to take
steps to defeat such a proposal.
In the North Carolina legislature, Democrats nearly signed off on a
similar measure this summer, until the national party chairman,
Howard Dean, stepped in to get the issue tabled for the session.
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