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Monday, December 03, 2007

LA Times Carries Water for Trojan Elephant

[via Media Matters]

An article in the December 1 edition of the LA Times reported on the Republican-backed "Trojan Elephant" California ballot initiative that would end California's winner-take-all apportionment of electoral votes and award California's electoral votes instead by congressional district.

"Supporters portray it as a way to make California's elections fair," proposes the article. Why opponents might disagree is not explained. Neither did the article indicate that these fair-minded electoral reformers were prominent partisan Republicans.

Of course, to review yet again, this ballot initiative proposes electoral-vote reapportionment only in California and nowhere else, rather than trying to implement a truly principled nationwide standard along these lines. This is because Republican backers of the initiative seek to undermine California's influence in national politics, split California's electoral votes (the initiative would likely bring as many votes to Republicans as Ohio did last time around), and steal another election by selectively changing the rules everybody plays by. A principled nationwide implementation of reapportionment would likely benefit Democrats, as will keeping the rules as they are now. Hence, of course, Republicans are eager to lie, cheat, and steal their way to continued influence against the will of the people. Nothing new.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You gotta admit that it will be awfully funny watching the Repigs dance as they try to explain why they oppose reapportionment in red states where it would help Democrats.

Dale Carrico said...

I would want to study the details more carefully, but I do think a nationwide campaign to demand reapportionment by district in every state, state by state, makes sense so long as each campaign contains the proviso that the reform doesn't take place until all or a sizeable plurality of states have enacted it. Certainly the anti-democratic Electoral College deserves a close looksee.

By the way, I am not absolutely certain that it is only progressive to abolish the EC, since a structural weighting of rural over urban voters may provide one way to ensure that localist politics are not utterly marginalized. I still lean strongly against the EC, but I'm open to arguments on the topic.