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.
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