| Topic: |
Science > Abortion |
| User: |
"james g. keegan jr." |
| Date: |
30 Jul 2007 01:39:53 PM |
| Object: |
Votescam |
Votescam
By Hendrik Hertzberg
The New Yorker
06 August 2007 Issue
At first glance, next year's Presidential election looks like a
blowout. But it might not be. Luckily for the incumbent party,
neither George W. Bush nor ***** Cheney will be running; indeed, the
election of 2008 will be the first since 1952 without a sitting
President or Vice-President on the ballot. At the moment, survey
research reflects a generic public preference for a Democratic
victory next year. Still, despite everything, there are nearly as
many polls showing particular Republicans beating particular
Democrats as vice versa. So this election could be another close one.
If it is, the winner may turn out to have been chosen not on November
4, 2008, but five months earlier, on June 3rd.
Two weeks ago, one of the most important Republican lawyers in
Sacramento quietly filed a ballot initiative that would end the
practice of granting all fifty-five of California's electoral votes
to the statewide winner. Instead, it would award two of them to the
statewide winner and the rest, one by one, to the winner in each
congressional district. Nineteen of the fifty-three districts are
represented by Republicans, but Bush carried twenty-two districts in
2004. The bottom line is that the initiative, if passed, would spot
the Republican ticket something in the neighborhood of twenty
electoral votes-votes that it wouldn't get under the rules prevailing
in every other sizable state in the Union.
The Tuesday after the first Monday in June is California's
traditional Primary Day. But it's not the one that everybody will be
paying attention to. Five months ago, the legislature hastily moved
the Presidential part up to February 5th, joining a stampede of
states hoping to claim a piece of the early-state action previously
reserved for Iowa and New Hampshire. June 3rd will be an altogether
sleepier, low-turnout affair. There may be a few scattered contests
for legislative nominations, but the only statewide items on the
ballot will be initiatives. More than two dozen have been filed so
far, ranging from a proposal to start a state-run Internet poker site
to pay for filling potholes to a redundant slew of anti-gay-marriage
measures. Few will make it to the ballot. Many are not even intended
to; they're a feint in some byzantine negotiation, or just a cheap
attempt to get a little attention-for a two-hundred-dollar fee,
anyone can file one. (Actually getting one on the ballot requires
more than four hundred thousand signatures, and the outfits that
collect them usually charge a dollar or two per signature.)
Initiative No. 07-0032-the Presidential Election Reform Act-is
different. It's serious. Its backers have access to serious money.
And it could pass.
Nominally, the sponsor of No. 07-0032 is Californians for Equal
Representation. But that's just a letterhead-there's no such
organization. Its address is the office suite of Bell, McAndrews &
Hiltachk, the law firm for the California Republican Party, and its
covering letter is signed by Thomas W. Hiltachk, the firm's managing
partner and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's personal lawyer for
election matters. Hiltachk and his firm have been involved in many
well-financed ballot initiatives before, including the recall that
put Arnold in Sacramento. They specialize in initiatives that are the
opposite of what they sound like-the Fair Pay Workplace Flexibility
Act of 2006, for example. It would have raised the state minimum wage
slightly-by a lesser amount than it has since been raised-and, in the
fine print, would have made it impossible ever to raise it again
except by a two-thirds vote in both houses of the legislature, while,
for good measure, eliminating overtime for millions of workers.
"Equal Representation" sounds good, too. And the winner-take-all
rule, which is in force in all but two states, does seem unfair on
the face of it. (The two are Maine and Nebraska, which use
congressional-district allocation. But they are so small-only five
districts between them-and so homogeneous that neither has ever split
its electoral votes.) It would be obviously unjust for a state to
give all its legislative seats to the party that gets the most votes
statewide. So why should Party A get a hundred per cent of that
state's electoral votes if forty per cent of its voters support Party
B? No wonder Democrats and Republicans alike initially react to this
proposal in a strongly positive way. To most people, the
electoral-college status quo feels intuitively wrong. So does war.
But that doesn't make unilateral disarmament a no-brainer.
If California does what No. 07-0032 calls for while everybody
else is still going with winner take all by state, the real-world
result will be to give Party B (in this case the Republicans) an
unearned, Ohio-size gift of electoral votes. In a narrow sense,
that's good if you like Party B, but not so good if you like Party A
(in this case the Democrats). Or if you think that in a democracy
everybody ought to play by roughly the same rules. Nor, by the way,
is Party B the only offender. Last week, the Democratic-controlled
legislature of North Carolina, a state that has gone Republican in
every Presidential election since 1976, enthusiastically took up a
bill to do the same mischief as the California initiative. The grab
would be smaller-it would appropriate perhaps three or four of North
Carolina's fifteen electoral votes for the Democrats-but the hands
would be just as dirty.
The California initiative flunks even the categorical-imperative
test. Imagine, as a thought experiment, that all the states were to
adopt this "reform" at once. Electoral votes would still be winner
take all, only by congressional district rather than by state.
Instead of ten battleground states and forty spectator states, we'd
have thirty-five battleground districts and four hundred spectator
districts. The red-blue map would be more mottled, and in some states
more people might get to see campaign commercials, because media
markets usually take in more than one district. But congressional
districts are as gerrymandered as human ingenuity and computer power
can make them. The electoral-vote result in ninety per cent of the
country would still be a foregone conclusion, no matter how close the
race.
California Initiative No. 07-0032 is an audacious power play
packaged as a step forward for democratic fairness. It's the
lotusland equivalent of Tom DeLay's 2003 midterm redistricting in
Texas, except with a sweeter smell, a better disguise, and larger
stakes. And the only way Californians will reject it is if they have
a chance to think about it first.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/printer_073007D.shtml
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get real. like jesus would ever own a gun or vote republican.
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