Our View: Election ‘reform’ for losers

A proposed change, which could be on next June’s ballot, in the way California’s votes are allocated in the presidential election might have a sheen of fairness, but it is nakedly partisan and subverts our constitutional system. Both it and a competing Democratic “reform” deserve to be roundly rejected.

The “Presidential Election Reform Act,” drafted by Thomas Hiltachk, a legal counsel to Gov. Schwarzenegger, would allocate most of California’s votes in the Electoral College according to the majority vote in each congressional district, rather than through the winner-take-all system that has prevailed since California became a state.

That might sound fairer than the current system, in which one candidate gets all 55 of California’s electoral votes even if he or she gets only 50-percent-plus-one of the popular vote. The impact would be to tilt more votes toward Republicans, perhaps giving a GOP presidential candidate an insurmountable advantage.

States get two electoral votes for the senators plus one vote for each congressional district. Of the state’s 53 congressional districts, 19 are represented by Republicans and 22 voted for President Bush in 2004. So this proposal would give the GOP candidate about 20 more electoral votes. If the votes broke as they did in 2004, for example, it would mean the GOP would not have had to win in Ohio to get a majority. (The two Senate votes would go to the statewide majority.)

This proposal could go on the ballot in June, changing the electoral rules in the middle of the game. For that reason alone, it deserves to be rejected.

It has become almost routine to denounce the “archaic” and “undemocratic” Electoral College system set up in the Constitution, but it has served the country reasonably well. It ensures that candidates pay attention to at least some smaller states rather than campaigning only in (and gearing policy only toward) large urban centers. The founders did not claim to be majority-rule democrats; indeed they were suspicious of the capacity of majorities to become as tyrannical as kings or despots. The Electoral College majority has differed from the popular majority only twice in our history and in neither case did the result create a genuine crisis (an issue different from the question of whether you consider the Bush presidency a disaster).

If there’s support for a constitutional amendment to change the Electoral College system, fine. But an alternative “reform” proposal also likely to be on the ballot creates a constitutionally dubious end-run around it. Embodied in Senate Bill 37 and pushed by Democrats, it would mandate that all of California’s votes go to the overall winner of the national popular vote - but only if is joined in making this change by enough other states to total 270 electoral votes.

California voters should reject both these self-serving proposals in June.