The state with the largest amount of electoral votes could soon be changing the way in which those votes are awarded to candidates on election night, just in time for the 2008 presidential election. The Republican-backed group Californians for Equal Representation has recently submitted a proposal to include an initiative on the June 3, 2008 state ballot that would replace California’s current winner-take-all system with one that allocates electoral votes based on the popular vote in each congressional district.
The present system in California, which has 55 electoral votes up for grabs, awards all of the state’s electoral votes to the candidate that wins the statewide popular vote. The recently proposed initiative, named the Presidential Election Reform Act (PERA), drastically alters this method of allocating votes, mandating that the winner of the state’s popular vote automatically receive two electoral votes, with the winner of each of the state’s 53 congressional districts receiving one electoral vote. To put this in perspective, if this proposed system had been in place in the 2004 Presidential election, President George W. Bush would have received 22 of California’s 55 electoral votes, because he outpolled Democratic Senator John Kerry in 22 of California’s 53 congressional districts.
This system being proposed for California is certainly not a new one. Two states, Nebraska and Maine, currently award electoral votes on a congressional district-by-congressional district basis with the winner of the statewide popular vote receiving two electoral votes. There has also recently been a proposal to institute this system in North Carolina. In addition, Senator Karl Mundt (R-S.D.) and Senator Frederick Coudert (R-N.Y.) proposed a constitutional amendment in 1956 that would have instituted this system in every state in the country. Obviously, that amendment did not meet with much success 51 years ago, and hopefully, its current reincarnation will be similarly defeated.
First, PERA has no hope of accomplishing its goal, which is to make the presidential race competitive again in California. PERA’s supporters have aptly pointed out that “California is largely taken for granted by presidential candidates,” as candidates have come to view the Democrats as possessing a lock on the state’s 55 electoral votes. However, as University of California law professor Vikram David Amar points out, California’s congressional districts are configured in such a way that they are either “safe” for Democrats or Republicans. So, “just as the statewide vote count is almost surely to lean Democratic these days, the results in each district are almost completely predictable and immutable.” Therefore, under the proposed system, the incentive for presidential candidates to actively campaign in California would still be low.
In addition, if this proposed ballot initiative passes, it will overrule the statutes passed by the California state legislature defending the state’s winner-take-all method for awarding electoral votes. As Amar points out, this could potentially be construed as unconstitutional. In the 2000 court case Bush v. Gore, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Associate Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, wrote in a concurring opinion that Article II of the U.S. Constitution prohibits states from involving entities other than their respective state legislatures in determining the manner in which the state chooses its electors to the Electoral College. Thus, devising a system for allocating the state’s electoral votes is solely the responsibility of the California state legislature, which has already come down in favor of the winner-take-all method.
Currently, the Field Poll is the first and only public opinion poll that has been conducted on this proposed initiative. Surveying 536 registered California voters between August 3 and August 12, the poll shows that 47 percent of registered voters back the change, while 35 percent oppose it. The margin of error was plus or minus 4.5 percentage points. Luckily, there is still time for Californians to come to their senses and realize that PERA will not accomplish its own self-proclaimed goals and is likely to be considered a violation of constitutional law.
This article was generally well-written. However, the first sentence was distracting. The word amount is used when items can't be counted; number is used when the items can be counted. So, this opening sentence would have been better if you'd said:
'with the largest number of electoral votes.'
Posted by: Ira | December 22, 2007 at 03:03 PM