How to rig a presidential election
George Skelton from the LA Times has an opinion piece in today's paper about the CA Republican attempt to rig the 2008 presidential election. And that is exactly what it is...the rigging of elections by tilting the outcome to give the Republican presidential candidate approximately 20 more Electoral College votes.
The Republican Party's legal team and Schwarzenegger's former personal attorney have put forward an initiative that will grant EC votes based on who wins in each congressional district, rather than the current "winner take all" method. Now that might sound good on the surface to some people, but when you look a little bit deeper, and you think for just a moment about the probability of the Republican Party trying to make elections more fair, then you'll probably come to the same conclusion I did...and that all the major papers in CA have already figured out...they're not. The only goal is to tilt the Electoral College so we have yet another four years of the same ol' in the White House.
California is gerrymandered in such a way that many districts are considered "safe" seats, and we can fairly reliably predict which party will win in which districts. Under the Republican scheme, this is what would determine the votes of the Electoral College in California. Now I'll be the first to say we should toss out the EC as it is no longer relevant in this day and age, but IMO, we need to move as a country to a one person, one vote system of electing our president. This initiative would be a half step measure that will only tilt results in the favor of Republicans, and dilute the power of California relative to the other states.
In other words, Republicans are afraid they can't win the White House now, so they have to rig it.
That's more democratic? I think not.
But it's a win/win for partisan Republicans that want to win at any cost. If it gets on the ballot and they can trick enough people into believing them there is a good chance we'll have four more years of Republicans running the country into the ground. If they don't win, they've still caused the Democratic party to waste a boatload of money fighting it.
My recommendation: if someone approaches you with a clipboard and asks you to sign a petition to make the Electoral College more democratic by reapportioning EC votes, tell them no. Tell them hell no.
I'm hoping people see it for what it is, and they won't get enough signatures to even get it on the ballot.
The Courage Campaign and the CA blogosphere is hard at work on this, and the first action taken was to deliver 2,148 copies of the initiative to the governor's office last week after he claimed he "hadn't read it". Bravo!
The Republican Party's legal team and Schwarzenegger's former personal attorney have put forward an initiative that will grant EC votes based on who wins in each congressional district, rather than the current "winner take all" method. Now that might sound good on the surface to some people, but when you look a little bit deeper, and you think for just a moment about the probability of the Republican Party trying to make elections more fair, then you'll probably come to the same conclusion I did...and that all the major papers in CA have already figured out...they're not. The only goal is to tilt the Electoral College so we have yet another four years of the same ol' in the White House.
California is gerrymandered in such a way that many districts are considered "safe" seats, and we can fairly reliably predict which party will win in which districts. Under the Republican scheme, this is what would determine the votes of the Electoral College in California. Now I'll be the first to say we should toss out the EC as it is no longer relevant in this day and age, but IMO, we need to move as a country to a one person, one vote system of electing our president. This initiative would be a half step measure that will only tilt results in the favor of Republicans, and dilute the power of California relative to the other states.
In other words, Republicans are afraid they can't win the White House now, so they have to rig it.
That's more democratic? I think not.
But it's a win/win for partisan Republicans that want to win at any cost. If it gets on the ballot and they can trick enough people into believing them there is a good chance we'll have four more years of Republicans running the country into the ground. If they don't win, they've still caused the Democratic party to waste a boatload of money fighting it.
My recommendation: if someone approaches you with a clipboard and asks you to sign a petition to make the Electoral College more democratic by reapportioning EC votes, tell them no. Tell them hell no.
I'm hoping people see it for what it is, and they won't get enough signatures to even get it on the ballot.
The Courage Campaign and the CA blogosphere is hard at work on this, and the first action taken was to deliver 2,148 copies of the initiative to the governor's office last week after he claimed he "hadn't read it". Bravo!
posted by Terry at 8:34 AM
1 Comments:
Hi Terry,
Great post. Thanks for the links.
Are you interested in joining our blog team? We want to keep bloggers in the loop on what we are up to and so forth. Shoot me an email if you want to join. juls. rosen @gmail. com
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Thanks again!
juls
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