Republican Presidents Forever

By Thomas Gangale

Imagine that the Republican Party, the party that stopped the re-count in Florida in 2000, the party that "lost" thousand of ballots in Ohio in 2004, is going to be the party of "Presidential Election Reform" in California in 2008. Imagine that.

It's such an innocuous-sounding initiative, both in its title and in its rationale. Since time immemorial, California has cast all of its electoral votes for the winner of the statewide popular vote for president, as all but two other states do today. If a candidate wins a plurality of the popular vote, he or she gets all of the electoral votes, no matter how razor-thin the margin of victory. The runner-up ends up with zero; all of the millions of votes cast for that candidate are zeroed-out. They might as well have not bothered to vote.

Suppose that a state didn't cast its electoral votes as a solid bloc; rather, suppose it used some mechanism to more faithfully reflect the popular vote. For instance, suppose that the Florida re-count in 2000 had been only a squabble over a couple of electoral votes one way or another, instead of over the entire bloc of 25. And, suppose George W. Bush's so-called victory in Florida by 500 votes was legitimate. In this scenario, 13 electoral votes might have gone to Bush, and 12 to Al Gore. The national electoral vote total would have been Gore 278 versus Bush 259.

This is a terrific reform idea, and California ought to lead the way for the rest of the nation, right?

Wrong.

The "Presidential Election Reform" initiative is slightly more complicated than apportioning the electoral votes on the basis of the statewide popular vote, as in the hypothetical Florida example above. Instead, this initiative would apportion California's electoral votes on the basis of which candidate won the popular vote in each congressional district, and award two electoral votes to the winner of the statewide popular vote.

How would this have played out in 2000? Bush won in 19 of California's 52 congressional districts, so he would have won 19 of California's electoral votes, while Gore would have only received 35 electoral votes instead of all 54. The national result? Bush 290, Gore 247. Bush would have had an even larger electoral vote victory that he actually had, even though Gore won the national popular vote. How is this initiative a "reform?”

It's not. It is a cynical, partisan ploy to peel electoral votes away from the Democratic presidential nominee. The backers of this initiative have no national strategy for enacting similar laws in other states; it’s all about dividing California’s electoral strength for the benefit of the Republican candidate. Are the predominately Republican states of the South and the interior West going to follow suit and split their electoral votes with Democrats? Certainly not!

This initiative could affect the outcome of the November 2008 presidential election... and far beyond. In the last 30 years, no Democrat has become president without winning all of California's electoral votes. If you don't want to see a Democratic president again in your lifetime, vote for this initiative.