Posted on 09/28/2007 7:30:21 AM PDT by SmithL
San Francisco -- Days after a controversial organization began collecting voter signatures for a ballot measure to change California's winner-take-all primary, a founder of the GOP-backed group says its major players are resigning - and the group will fold - due to lack of funding and support.
"The levels of support just weren't there," said Marty Wilson, the Sacramento-based fundraiser, in a telephone interview Thursday.
Wilson was among the founding members of Californians for Equal Representation, the group led by Sacramento attorney Thomas Hiltachk that intended to collect roughly 434,000 signatures to qualify the Presidential Election Reform Act for the June 2008 ballot.
The measure would have changed the state's winner-take-all means of awarding Electoral College votes to a proportional system that would have awarded 53 of the state's 55 electoral votes - one by one - to the popular vote winner of each of the state's 53 congressional districts. The other two electoral votes would have gone to the statewide popular vote winner.
The change, Democrats had complained, would benefit the GOP - and perhaps alter the outcome of the 2008 presidential election.
"There has not been the financial level of support necessary to run a viable campaign, and there wasn't sufficient interest from donors inside or outside the state to qualify the measure for the ballot," Wilson said.
Wilson said he has disassociated himself from the committee, and he confirmed that Hiltachk, who has represented both Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the state GOP, resigned from the committee Wednesday, as has spokesman Kevin Eckery.
Chris Lehane, a Democratic strategist, reacted with caution to the news, saying that Democrats, who have fought the effort aggressively from the start, intended to verify fully the committee's demise before they dropped protests and even possible legal action against the organization.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
$hit. We’d better not lose OH next year, or this country is f**ked.
It looks like Pete Wilson’s little “Elect Rudy” project just took a major step backwards.
Sleazy deals, backed by undisclosed donors... I’m so sick of this cr@p!!!!
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
It would never have withstood the legal challenges anyway.
I’m glad this is failing.
This would’ve been a lousy precedent to set. We’d celebrate the liberals losing California ... wouldn’t be so happy when we lost Texas, Flordia, etc.
H
Two states already do this, so the “precedent” is there.
There’s no real problem with it, it’s constitutional (obviously as there has been no challenge to Maine or Nebraska).
In some ways it would put the electoral college back to what it was when we started — electors representing a significant but still small number of people. States would still benefit from the EC, but candidates would have incentive to compete, and voters incentive to vote, that they don’t have today.
And recounts would be much less likely, and also simpler. For example, in Florida there probably wouldn’t have been a recount. I don’t think any DISTRICT was close one way or the other, all the places Gore was counting already gave him their votes. They would have been competing over the 2 STATE-wide electoral votes only. Oh wait, it was so close that might have swung the election.
But anytime it isn’t within 2 votes, a contest would only have to recount a district.
I’ve always thought we should limit a state to x electoral votes. If they get too big, they should split into two states. Having a few states with so many EVs skews the process, and really takes away the value of the vote for too many people.
Better to fix it on a nationwide scale though, I guess. Of course, in most states the predominant party would control the votes to prevent the change to take away their own party’s lock on the EVs, so the only place you are going to pass this is in states narrowly divided.
predictable. Democrats won’t mess with any of these. They’ve won the ‘08 election already in their minds. so they think.
I never said it was unconstitutional ... I said it was a lousy precedent to set. Maine and Nebraska are very small states, with very little national electoral exposure ... California is a different story entirely.
>> I’ve always thought we should limit a state to x electoral votes. If they get too big, they should split into two states.
The Federal government does not have the Constitutional authority to forcibly split States. The federal government forcibly dividing large powerful States into smaller, less powerful states might be the best way to concentrate ALL political power in Washington D.C.
This is a lousy idea.
>> Having a few states with so many EVs skews the process, and really takes away the value of the vote for too many people.
The Electoral College process actually skews the power into smaller states ... where elections hinge on Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, etc - rather than New York, California and Texas.
Larger states are more powerful in the Electoral College - because they’ve got FAR more people. The power of their vote is the same ... but the aggregate power of the 21-Million people in Texas SHOULD be higher than the power of the 1.2-million in New Hampshire.
Just as an example ...
As it stands, the 1.2 million in NH have 4 electoral votes (which comes to .0000033 electoral votes per person), and Texas’s 21 Million people have 34 electoral votes (which comes to .000001619 electoral votes per person).
Individual voters in New Hampshire have TWICE the electoral power of voters in Texas. You’re disdain for the voting power of people in larger states doesn’t hold water.
H
But you have to love the msm. How many times in this article do they refer to the effort as being "GOP-backed" yet can't even mention one GOP officeholder nor one GOP committee official?
This kinda "cr@p" should make everyone sick!
The only reason anyone is liking this idea now, is because of the assinine Warren Court's infamous "Cows Don't Vote" and/or "One Man, One Vote" decision about 45 years ago which has robbed rural (think red voting counties) representation of it's proper geographic representation!!!
That's what this whole thing has been about in reality!!! (not the electorial college issue)
Marty Wilson is a slimy, nasty little Wilson operative who jumped on the Arnold bandwagon right out of the gate. He is a key cog in the rancid RINO machine that has worked to smother conservative grassroots activism in California for the past 15 years or so.
My guess is that the Kennedys put in a call and brought the whole thing to a grinding halt.
Interesting comparison! Thanks for doin' the math.
The change, if it was to spread nation-wide, would have assured that the populous states, which include the largest liberal cities, would have dominated the election.
The present Electoral College mechanism limits our exposure to vote-stealing. It does no good for Demoncrats to steal votes in Kalifornia, where liberals have the political power to steal votes, because the winner-takes-all system already awards them all of Kalifornia's votes.
Instead, to steal an election, the liberals are forced to attempt theft of votes in states which are dominated by conservatives, or at least where conservatives have a slight majority.
Those who support eliminating the Electoral College winner-takes-all, should also support eliminating the US Senate, since that body represents states, not people.
I want to know whose money they were hiding. There are several articles mentioning that on 9/11/07 Pete Wilson/Eckery's group took $175,000 from "Missouri Lawyer" Charles Hurth III's organization, TIA or Take Initiative America (a tax exempt non-profit established on 9/10). They refused to disclose who funded TIA. Reports say Hurth is a Giuliani supporter and Pete Wilson just endorsed Rudy. That seems a logical place to look.
On a side note, I would assume Hurth III is grandson of the old NY Mets General Manager, previously President of the Southern Association. Maybe these are Rudy's baseball-fans supporters, LOL.
Why would the Kennedys cut it off? They prefer their Dem puppets to their RINO puppets?
True. I think we call those people liberals.
Prior threads seemed to be full of cheerleaders supporting this initiative. I wonder where they are today.
Well that explains this a bit.
Guiliani’s camp has been had at work trying to have the primaries as early as possible because his “name recognition card” expires when people learn about other candidates and Guiliani’s position are just a clone of Hillary clinton.
(BTW did anyone catch the BILL Clinton “pretty in pink” interview? This time he was the one with pink in the form of a neck tie.)
Giuliani has also been campaigning in the traditionally democrat districts where others, preferring to go after the larger Republican groups, don’t spend time. With little effort, he could probably take districts like Oakland and East L.A., in the Republican primary that is. But he’d have a heck of a time winning the state under the current system.
This doesn’t sound like the problem is the peepls republik; it sounds like an edict came down GOP channels to kill it.
I guess the Lundgren Lover is gonna be on the new FOX News Channel's Financial News program as well as doin his regular bit on KFBK for miserable moderates RINO talk radio!!! You know... Sacramento's favorite "tacos!" (that's what it sounds like when the announcer introduces him)
Sacramento County Sherrif John McGuinnes fills in in Tom's abscence and bores me to death like that miserable moderate political hack Gary "Girlyvoice" Dietrich... Judas Priest!!! Yech!!! Spit!!!
Why do you keep listening to that pansy?
I’m in the same business... I’m a competitor!!! My clients listen to him so I have to be prepared to undo all the dumbage he’s done to them!!! It certainly ain’t fer his politickle whisdumb!!!
You're a pansy-ass talk show host?????
No! I’m a financial professional!!!
Well that’s a relief.
ROFLMHO!!!
No! I’m a financial professional!!!
Uh huh! Sure ya are! ;-)
Bingo. The same can be said for Colorado or Missouri, since they're still on the winner-take-all system as well, we're talking 9 and 11 electoral votes each, and a full 20 electoral votes in Ohio.
I cannot believe the arrogance of some freepers who basically want to thumb their nose at the rest of the country and write off any state that's not a nice solid "red state" in the deep south or west. It's almost as if they're begging for Bob Dole redux.
Bush won by the skin of his teeth by picking up 271 electoral votes with the minimum threshold to win being 270. With New Hampshire (one of the election 2000 states that put Bush over the top) sliding further and further to the Dems, we have to do everything we can to keep Missouri, New Mexico, Ohio, Colorado, and Iowa from going to the dark side.
Sean Hannity was on the radio the other day saying he was fairly confident that the Hilderbeast will pick a running mate who can carry a swing state (he named four possibilities, including Bill Richardson and Congressman Ted Strictland of Ohio) rather than pick Obama (who gives her nothing except praise from the MSM), and I'm inclined to agree.
The GOP needs to follow suit and get SOMEONE on the ticket who is "popular" enough in a swing state that they are guaranteed to put it in the GOP column and have the potential to put several other states as well.
And another thing, with the RATs continuing their push to abolish the electoral college and replace it with the "popular" vote so the big city goons can pick our Presidents for us, we really need to beat them to the punch on electoral college reform and have the district-by-district system adapted nationally. I am confident we would win under such a system because a lot of RAT-controlled Congressional districts that elect pro-life, pro-gun "moderate" Dem types will never vote for the likes of Hilderbeast. Bush would have won under a district-by-district system and I think the next GOP nominee can as well. But we need to adapt it nationally because in partisan states you'll see the Dems block it in California and the GOP block it in Texas and so on, to maintain the status quo monopoly over the electoral votes they currently enjoy.
In states like mine that ARE competitive outside of Chicago, such a method would finally allow us to participate in the Presidential election process.
And by the way, THIS scenario we are facing with the electoral college is why I won't "get over" freepers celebrating Tommy Thompson's exit from the primary. Just because a bunch of egomanics INSIST we nominate someone from THEIR region of the country (apparently only southern candidates are "true conservatives"... that Ronald Reagan fellow must have been an awful RINO) and want to shove a bunch of "safe state" nominees down the party's throat, doesn't mean the rest of the country will elect them. I'll all for putting a southerner on the ticket, but one that can actually WIN a state that doesn't go GOP by default, rather than someone who would lead us down the path of defeat like "President" George Allen.
(snip)For his part, Rudolph Giuliani, who has been working his way around California this week, said he played no role in the initiative effort, and did not know Mr. Hurth, who contributed to his campaign earlier this year.
“As far as I am concerned you can leave it the way it is,” Mr. Giuliani said during a news conference here. “In fact, in some ways, you might consider, I think that this is a state I can win. That might actually favor some of the other Republican candidates who might have a more difficult time winning this state. I think this is a state I have 50-50 chance of winning.”
(Update) A postscript: The New York Daily News reported on its political blog that Mr. Giuliani’s top fundraiser, Paul Singer, told the paper that he was the sole financial backer of the initiative. Mr. Singer is a member of the national finance committee on the Giuliani campaign.
In response, Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, issued a statement saying: “Given his role in the Giuliani campaign, voters deserve to know the truth about Rudy’s involvement in and knowledge about this shameful effort to disenfranchise voters.”
(source: NYT blog)
Why don't we just abolish the States altogether and have regional governance, too? /s
Thanks for the ping.......and the Julie-Annie briefing.
That’s not a bad idea, actually (since one of these days, we’re probably going to have to invade the rodent states as enemy combatants).
CORRUPTION PERSONIFIED!
If you have pitchforks, I have the torches - on to Sacramento!
The average partisan here on FR struggles to remember the original intent as both party adjust their constitutional garters. Imagine for a moment, how hard it is for a 6th grader, with little or no background, to understand the US Constitutional in light of the onslaught of partisan revisionists from both the right and the left, seeking a temporal advantage without concern for posterity.
To even the casual reader, the US Constitution appears to tie together a confederation of autonomous states united in a single purpose. Imagine the 6th grader who reads the document and then suffers the teacher's explanation of what the words really mean. The new paradigms; the wisdom of the mob and the omnipotence of a central government.
This is spooky! You read my mind, then articulated my thoughts much better than I ever could!!!
Yep—Amerigomag is poetic, and brilliant, too! And since you agree with him... don’t let it go to your head! lol.
Seriously, I’m glad to know that I’m not the only one not jumping on this Congressional District thing. To me, it is just more incrementalism, moving us closer to the Dems’ dream of the popular vote. After all, if people think it’s better to have their voice directly heard from their district, wouldn’t they love to directly have their vote counted at the national level? And if we think gerrymandering of CD’s is bad now, just wait until each CD counted as an electoral vote. The “anything to win” crowd needs to look beyond the next election—to posterity, as Amerigomag so eloquently stated.
There are no scarier words, IMO.
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