(UPDATE: David promised more on how you can help, here it is! – promoted by Bob Brigham)

There is no reason for a well-informed Californian not to know about the Dirty Tricks initiative to steal the 2008 election by changing the way the state apportions its electoral votes.  By now practically every newspaper in the state has written an editorial against it.  And now one of the deans of Sacramento, George Skelton, bluntly criticizes the maneuver.

The chutzpah award for this summer has a runaway winner. It’s the small team of Republican operatives trying to rig the 2008 presidential race.

“Rig” means tilting the playing field to assure continued Republican occupancy of the White House — perhaps for a very long time.

over…

Skelton intimates that this could backfire on the Republican operatives by creating a rallying point for progressives and Democrats:

Whatever this is, it’s brazen — a strategy based on the assumption of a low voter turnout that leans Republican while the electoral college measure slips under the Democratic radar.

But I can envision just the opposite. I can see this initiative drawing a lot of media attention that awakens Democratic voters.

“It’s a ‘wacky California’ story,” (Peter) Ragone says. “Like in, ‘Here they go again!’ “

Skelton offers the obvious alternative to this power grab in clear and concise language.

What would make sense is to completely shutter the archaic electoral college and elect the president by national popular vote. The argument that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it was discredited in 2000 when the system did break. For the fourth time in history, the candidate who got the most citizen votes lost out in the electoral college. No need to recite the national consequences of that glitch.

But before we can tear down the electoral college, Americans must get over the notion that states — not citizens — should elect the president. Whomever most people want to be president should be. That’s how every other officeholder is elected in this land.

Exactly, though placing it on the ballot as an alternative would probably needlessly confuse the issue.  Especially if you see it as a rallying point.  I don’t think the 30,000-feet strategy of Ragone and Chris Lehane is to energize Democrats, necessarily.  They want to spend a lot of money and “confuse to kill” if they have to.  But the progressive movement smells an opportunity here, a chance to use this campaign as a springboard, to activate progressives all over the state to fight this dirty trick.

Like I said, well-informed people have no excuse not to know about this.  But those one notch below may not be at all aware.  That’s why we need to make sure we have the resources we need to run a positive campaign bent on capitalizing on this dirty trick to change the political map in the state.  Republicans will rue the day they even tried this.  More on how you can help later.

A lot going on for a Tuesday in August.  Dan Morain at the LAT has the latest story:

Democrats proposed an initiative today aimed at having California embrace the movement to elect presidents by popular vote.

The initiative also is designed to head off a Republican effort to wrest away California’s electoral votes. Republican consultants are proposing a separate initiative to change California’s winner-take-all system of awarding its 55 electoral votes. Under the Republican measure, electoral votes would be awarded based on how congressional districts vote, an idea that could benefit the Republican nominee.

If the competing Democratic and Republican measures make it to the ballot next June, California would become a battleground over the electoral college system. The state has 55 electoral votes, more than any other state, and more than 10% of the 538 electoral votes nationally.

Chris Lehane announced the competing initiative at a press conference today.  And the initiative has been filed with the Attorney General.

I should add that there was another poll out today on this issue, by Rasmussen, which showed that the right-wing Electoral College power grab fails badly once people are given information about it’s implications, but that polling on a national popular vote concept is pretty favorable.  Numbers on the flip:

The proposal being pitched in California would award one Electoral Vote to the winner of each Congressional District along with two Electoral Votes for the statewide winner. In a theoretical sense, 45% of voters nationwide think that’s a good idea. Thirty percent (30%) disagree while 25% are not sure. However, even that tepid level of support dissipates when voters learn that a change in California could significantly increase the number of Republican Electoral Votes. Once that is factored into the equation, support drops to 31% and opposition increases to 43%.

It’s interesting to note that Republican support for the measure barely increases when told of the potential benefit to their own party. That may be due to a sense of fairness or a nagging realization that the same thing could happen in other states where the GOP would lose votes. Forty-five percent (45%) favor the concept in theory and 48% favor it after learning how it would impact the results in California. Among Democrats and unaffiliated voters, support plunges dramatically once the electoral implications of a change in California are explained.
Overall, 54% of voters would like to get rid of the Electoral College and have the winner of the popular vote become President. Thirty percent (30%) disagree. Democrats strongly support this approach while Republicans are evenly divided. Women are more enthusiastic about it than men.

I’ve been advocating for the National Popular Vote plan for some time.  If the Electoral College were enacted after the 14th Amendment, it would be found unconstitutional.  Every election in our system is majority-rule except for the one for the highest office in the land.  Californians are disenfranchised every year as they watch small states like Wyoming get an outsized portion of the electoral vote.

The GOP spin was predictable:

Kevin Eckery, spokesman for the GOP measure, said the Democratic-backed measure would leave Californians with little or no voice in national politics.

“If you ignore the congressional districts, there would be one big overwhelming national vote,” Eckery said. “What matters in L.A. or what matters in Santa Monica, won’t matter. It will be just one vote thrown into the mix.”

Um, what’s wrong with one big overwhelming national vote for a national office?  And did what matters in Santa Monica and LA matter in 2004?  2000?  1988?  That’s a ridiculous argument.

This is getting very, very interesting.

(They have something of a website up now too, at FairElectionReform.com. – promoted by Brian Leubitz)

Some major funders are preparing for battle over this cockamamie electoral vote initiative being pushed by GOP lawyers:

Leading Democrats are uniting with Hollywood producer Stephen Bing and hedge fund manager Tom Steyer to oppose a California ballot proposal they fear could hand the 2008 presidential election to the Republican nominee […]

In what is shaping up as an important subplot to the 2008 race, a political committee is being formed by Steyer that will raise money – possibly tens of millions of dollars – to defeat the GOP-backed idea.

The committee is being supported by Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Democratic leaders in the Legislature.

The proposal is a “power grab orchestrated by the Republicans,” Feinstein and Boxer said in a joint statement. It’s “another cynical move to keep the presidency in Republican control.”

Democrats were scheduled to announce formation of the committee, Californians for Fair Election Reform, on Thursday.

This is tens of millions of dollars that ought to be going to candidates or local GOTV efforts.  The Republicans have already won the battle through embarking on this stubborn and cynical kamikaze maneuver that is doomed to failure.  But if they want to play this way, fine.  This will certainly raise progressive turnout for the June primaries, which is something we all should be thinking about.

It’s an old joke in L.A. that nobody here knows about a local story until it makes the New York Times.  Well, then by now, they’ve all read about this attempt by GOP lawyers to change the way California’s electoral votes are apportioned and hand the 2008 election to the Republicans.

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?

Torres has a couple quotes in the piece, but what interested me is a preview of the messaging that will be used to sell this scheme to the general public.  It actually mirrors what every Democrat in the Legislature was saying in the run-up to changing the Presidential primary date…

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 (thanks for the slur, New York Times! -ed.) 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.”

They’re going to use a message of fairness and making California count.  That’s going to be attractive to a low-information voter, and millions will have to be spent to counter it. 

According to the Times piece, Eckery’s group is fundraising right now, and it will probably take a few million dollars to get the initiative on the June ballot, including about half a million for polling.  That’s a low bar; and that’s why it is so crucial that we get the word out immediately about this effort to steal the vote.  Building a war chest is less important than using some CDP money to define what this initiative would represent – a piecemeal solution to a problem that would virtually guarantee a Republican successor to George Bush.  This is not something to attack with nuance; the goal is to make it so unpopular that any effort to put it on the ballot would be a suicide mission.