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Putting the Electoral College to a vote

Posted October 2, 2008 12:26:28 PM

Back in August, I wrote about legislation that would commit California to apportion its 55 electoral votes based on the national popular vote in presidential elections. Like 47 other states, California allocates its electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis.

Similar proposals have been offered in about half the states.

All of the proposals are contingent on approval by a combination of states representing 270 electoral votes - the total required to elect a president.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the California bill, saying a change of that magnitude ought to be presented to the voters. He encouraged supporters to try that route.

If this was on the ballot in 2010, how would you vote?

Here's a Reader's Digest version of the arguments pro and con:

Under the current system, supporters say, presidential elections are decided by a small handful of states in which the outcome isn't largely predetermined. You know the list: Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, occasionally a few others. Many supporters, of course, also are unhappy that President Bush was elected with less than a majority in 2000. That has happened three other times in U.S. history

Critics of a popular-vote-based plan say small states would never see a presidential candidate. They also say the current system requires candidates to appeal to more than one or two regions of the country, and warn about the tyranny of the majority - a phrase that originated in Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, though James Madison wrote about it a half-century earlier in the Federalist Papers.

-- Jim Sweeney

Recent Post

Pick-pocket veto

Posted October 1, 2008 10:47:54 AM

Every legislative session has its outrages, and many of them don't surface until bills already are passed and signed into law. This year, we've got a late-breaking outrage involving a veto.

Here's the story, courtesy of Timm Herdt of the Ventura County Star:

Fillmore, a small city in Ventura County, cut a deal to create a local sales office for Owens & Minor, a major supplier of medical supplies. Because the sales were officially completed in Fillmore, the city gets the local share of the sales tax. In the past, the orders went straight to distribution centers in Vista, Industry and Livermore, and those cities collected the sales tax. One city raiding another is nothing unusual. This one is worth about $5 million a year. What's different here is the side deal cut by Fillmore: it's giving 85 percent of the sales tax revenue to the broker who arranged the deal. That's a cool $4.25 million a year that won't be paying for cops, firefighters and other public services in Vista, Industry, Livermore or Fillmore.

As my colleague Paul Gullixson put it, this deal would embarrass a Chicago ward-heeler.

Now to the just concluded legislative session and the veto.

Assemblywoman Loni Hancock, a Democrat whose district includes Livermore, introduced legislation to undue the kickback. Owens & Minor lawyers pointed out that a contract's a contract, so the bill was amended to prohibit any similar deals in the future.

The bill was supported by the League of California Cities, the California State Association of Counties and nearly unanimous majorities in both houses of the Legislature. And it was vetoed Friday by the governor, who cited his pique with the overdue state budget and invited Hancock to try again next year.

If anything the overdue budget should have underscored the value of this legislation. Cities and counties are in trouble too. It's bad enough that they pick each other's pockets, but skimming money off the top for private interests sounds a lot like Nathan Detroit's floating crap game in "Guys and Dolls."

Well, for one broker, luck was a lady tonight.

-- Jim Sweeney

Recent Post

Debate tests for Obama, Palin

Posted September 29, 2008 3:31:37 PM

Looking ahead to Thursday's vice presidential debate, I'm going to differ with my colleague Paul Gullixson who says both candidates lost the first presidential debate. I don't think either candidate "won," but Barack Obama passed a significant test. He spoke credibly on foreign policy, which is clearly John McCain's best issue. He wasn't the one who botched the names of foreign leaders, and he scored points with his jibe that McCain speaks as if the Iraq war started in 2007 with the surge rather than in 2003. What does Obama get for passing the test? More time to talk to conservative Democrats and independents who might have been lost if he performed badly. These are the voters who will decide the election. And he still needs to make that sale.

What does that have to do with Thursday's debate in St. Louis?

Sarah Palin faces a similar test. She must show a better grasp of national issues than she did in her interview last week on the CBS Evening News. Her answers need to be more sophisticated than, "I'm all about the position that America is in and that we have to look at a $700 billion bailout." As with Obama, the bar isn't terribly high. But she needs to clear it if her early personal appeal is going to translate into traction with those same voters in the middle. A poor performance might even hurt her on the Republican right, where some commentators already have suggested replacing her on the ticket.

-- Jim Sweeney