Charles H. Bell and Thomas Hiltachk’s law firm, with funding by Bob Perry (Swiftboat ad creator) filed a ballot initiative to strip California's winner-takes-all electoral votes and redistribute them to the counties. Charles Bell is the General Counsel for the California Republican Party. This group is also the same one that funded the recall of Governor Gray Davis.

California has the largest electoral votes in the nation with 55, and because the Republicans are fairly certain they cannot win California in 2008, they have sponsored this ballot to change how California's votes are counted. They believe that if they are redistributed to the counties, then they can, at least, win a few of these votes.

The problem is, this goes against the entire reason the electoral college was created and it is essentially a way to steal or cheat voters.

If California abandons its winner-take-all rule while red states like Texas do not, it will be hard for a Democratic nominee to assemble an Electoral College majority, even if he or she wins a sizable majority of the popular vote. That appears to be just what the backers of the California idea have in mind.

Additionally, if this makes it onto the ballot, it will cost millions of dollars on both sides to compete and attempt to defeat.

The New York Times reported, "If voters understand that the initiative is essentially an elaborate dirty trick posing as reform, they are likely to vote against it. But judging by the misleading name of their organization, the initiative’s backers want to fool the public into thinking the change would make elections more fair. They are planning on putting it to a vote in June 2008, an election when there will be few other things on the ballot, and turnout is expected to be extremely low. This bad-faith initiative is yet another example of the ways in which referenda can be used for mischief and a reminder of why they are a bad way to resolve complex public-policy issues.

Opponents of the initiative announced yesterday that they are sponsoring their own, rival initiative, which would commit California to a national plan that aims to ensure that the winner of the national popular vote becomes president. That idea makes much more sense.

 It is about whether to twist the nation’s system of electing presidents to give one party an unfair advantage. No principled elected official, or voter, of either party should support that."

It is important to note that Bob Perry is the largest contributor to the Texas Republican Party, and a board member to the Council for National Policy, an extreme right-wing "christian" organization. If Perry's group were to succeed in striping Ca of it's 55 electoral votes, Texas would then become the most powerful electoral state. So why hasn't Perry put forth the same ballot initiative in Texas? Because it is a republican state, with 34 electoral votes (2nd largest in the country), if this same initiative passed in Texas it would not be in HIS best interest, because many counties in Texas, like Travis county (which houses Austin, TX) would vote democrat and essentially do to Texas what Perry wants to do to California.

No matter where you stand on the political spectrum, Democrat, Republican, Independant, Liberatarian, or whatever - California voters need to join together to defeat this measure. In the end, it strips California of being recognized as the most important state in the union in terms of voting power. CA VOTERS -  DO NOT GIVE UP OUR RIGHTS.