Given the widespread anger at the record of the Bush administration, few people think it will be easy for a Republican to win a fair presidential election in 2008.
But the backers of a proposed California ballot initiative aim to make it easy - by getting around that inconvenient word "fair".
Devised by Sacramento political attorney Thomas Hiltachk, the Presidential Election Reform Act is a clever confidence trick, disguised as reform of the Electoral College. The PERA's true purpose is to guarantee about 20 additional electoral votes to the Republican Party, with the aim of setting up a GOP victory not just in the 2008 presidential election, but in many more to follow.
You know the old saying: if you can't beat em, change the rules. That's the new motto of the California Republican Party. Taking a break from complaining about their governor, who as usual is right where they're wrong, and who is also, not coincidentally, the only Republican in state-wide office in California, they've decided to try to change the rules for electing the next president to make it more difficult for a Democrat to win.
The CA GOP just jumped the shark. Here are three things you can do:
The similarities between the 2003 recall and the current electoral vote swindle are quite stark (and not only because it is the same people using the same language about a right-wing power grab in an election where nobody knows the turnout). So let's compare the benchmark testing by Field Poll in each race, among all registered voters.
Stockton Record, "Awarding California's electoral votes based on the outcome in each congressional district is unfair, harmful to democratic precepts and a blatant political power grab."
OC Register, "A proposed change, which could be on next June's ballot, in the way California's votes are allocated in the presidential election might have a sheen of fairness, but it is nakedly partisan and profoundly subversive of our constitutional system."
