Some good news from the left coast: California’s proposed ballot initiative, which would have changed the way CA allocates its presidential electoral votes from winner-take-all to a formula relating to congressional districts, appears to be near death.
The initiative would have changed CA law so that electoral votes would have been awarded according to the winner in each of CA’s 53 congressional districts, with the last two votes going to the overall popular vote winner. The result would likely have been handing about 20 electoral votes — equivalent to the state of Ohio — to the Republicans.
However, the effort to place the measure on the ballot has collapsed amid a frenzy of shady dealings and finger-pointing.
Unable to raise sufficient money and angered over a lack of disclosure by its one large donor, veteran political law attorney Thomas Hiltachk, who drafted the measure, said he was resigning from the committee. Hiltachk’s departure is a major blow to the operation because he organized other consultants who had set about trying to raise money and gather signatures for the initiative. Campaign spokesman Kevin Eckery said he was ending his role as well…. [B]ackers said Thursday that they believed the measure was all but dead, at least for the 2008 election.
The source of the group’s largest donation was questionable at best.
Democratic activists including [Chris] Lehane had charged Wednesday that there was money laundering at work behind the GOP-backed proposed ballot measure. They had vowed to give Republicans until “high noon” Monday to reveal the sources or sources of a $175,000 contribution received Sept. 11 from an organization called Take Initiative America. Take Initiative America was founded by a Missouri lawyer, Charles Hurth III…. Jonathan Wilcox, spokesman for the Missouri group, said it had no intention of revealing where the money came from.
This was all too cute by half for the guys running the show:
Hiltachk said he had demanded that “Take Initiative America fully disclose the source of its funds,” and said he was assured it would make such a disclosure soon.
“Nonetheless,” Hiltachk said, “I am deeply troubled by their failure to disclose prior to my demand and by their failure to disclose to me or to our committee that Take Initiative America had been formed just one day prior to making the contribution…. I am not willing to proceed under such circumstances,” Hiltachk said. “Therefore, I am resigning my role in this campaign.”
Eckery added: “There’s no reason to be cute on campaign contributions. We had nothing to hide, and the public has every right to know.”
Over at The New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg thinks that the Governator may be behind the initiative’s collapse. Hiltachk is close to Schwarzenegger, and Schwarzenegger recently went public with his displeasure over the initiative, saying that it reflects “a loser’s mentality,” in effect conceding that the Republicans cannot win in 2008 under the current rules.
Good for Ahnold. He may just lead his party out of the wilderness. Now, Mr. Governator, about that gay marriage bill that’s still sitting on your desk (which, by the way, he’s apparently not going to sign)…
That anonymous money backer was Paul Singer, billionaire friend of Giuliani:
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From the LA Times:
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…a couple of decades ago. I couldn’t figure out (after cursory inspection) how it might play out, though, and dropped the subject.
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I vaguely recall that there is at least one state that apportions its electors this way. I believe that Nebraska does–I’m not sure–but the state that does has only two or so congressional districts.
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If CA were to apportion its electors this way, it should be contingent on all of the other states doing the same. Not some, all.
If we had to keep the wretched electoral college doing it by district instead of state would be a somewhat more fair method of distribution and in effect put every state in play making the popular vote all that more important and making sure that the votes in purple states have the same weight as those in solid states. That said this proposal would only work if all the states did it, doing it by district means that even if the GOP wins an OH sized share of votes from CA the Dems similarly win half of OH, a good chunk of Florida, and a MA sized share of votes in Texas. In other words everyone is better represented. Conservatives in MA get their voices heard as do liberals in Dallas. But doing it state by state or in CA specifically is just a GOP ploy.
That means national parties have a Presidential race interest in gerrymandering, as opposed to just gerrymandering for the sake of getting seats in the House.
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It’s not an improvement worth trying to achieve, since going to a popular vote would be just as hard to achieve though much fairer in result.
it is still a bad idea. Congressional districts are largely uncompetitive due to gerrymandering. This new plan would create a strong incentive to gerrymander, taking power away from people and putting it in the hands of state legislatures.
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It is high time states passed the national popular vote compact. The presidency is a national office, and the amount of importance the EC places on certain states is absurd.
…the Gerrymandering issue that made me lose interest in pursuing the matter.
You seem to have made my point before me in the time I was writing it. Didn’t mean to be a plagarist. Glad to see we are in agreement.
so more than one person could conclude it independently.
in 2000, it would have given Bush an ever bigger margin over Gore, despite Gore’s popular vote win.
If the rules for assigning electoral votes were different, then Gore and Bush would have campaigned differently.
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Dems wouldn’t spend so much time in industrial cities in Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota, etc. GOPs wouldn’t work so hard at rallying the base in regions where livestock outnumber people 10 to 1. They’d converge on metro areas — the doughnaught rings surrounding large cities — and on small cities. That’s where CDs tend to be diverse and more competitive. They also exist in more than 12 states.
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Still, it does seem that the Dems have more CDs with huge numbers, whereas the GOP’s best CDs don’t have as big a margin of victory… so if the popular vote is really close it’s reasonable to believe that they just might have a [more slim] majority in a larger number of states.