They start to think hard about voting reform.

Basically, they are looking to divide the California electoral vote, with some portion going to the state winner and the remainder going county by county, however it ends up. GOP wins a county, they get an electorial vote, Dems do it, same deal.

Should an Independant run, they would then get votes as well.

[from the New Yorker]

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2007/08/06/070806taco_talk_hertzberg

Clearly, the immediate short term goal is to:

-focus where dollars are to be spent, to insure solid wins where they can be had,

engage in unbalanced reform,

"Let's try this here, and if it works, then let's do it everywhere..." --Sorry, but that's about a 20 some electorial vote handout to the GOP.

do some longer term damage to the electoral college.

I don't like the timing of this, nor the approach, for what should be obvious reasons. The main one being, we don't need to be giving the GOP any help right now, do we?

(I sure don't think so. They've earned this coming election, I say let them enjoy it.)

There are some thing we could do. Say Texas, for example! Why not do the same reform there at the same time? I'm sure there are lots of other ways to address that poor balance bit.

We've more or less shut down a whole lot of the voting fraud, manupulation, and discrimination with the firing of the attorneys, voting machine issue awareness and [some --not enough] reform.

Where fund raising is concerned, the Democrats really are shining right now, largely due to Internet politics working well and a general GOP slump from the many scandals, poor decisions, etc... Oh, yeah the war too!

I find it very interesting that we could not have these discussions when GW was being selected. Wny have them now?

High likelihood of losing seems to be a factor, and that brings me to the upside of this whole thing:

-we are actually gonna have an election next year!
[some are thinking it won't happen]

-a solid discussion on how to achieve voting reform is always welcome

-third parties could get some traction with this kind of scheme.

I'm sure there are others, but those are the net positives I see coming out of this. I'm just not sure this makes any sense, given the above.

The link above is an interesting read. Discuss?

[sure beats abortion, etc.... huh?]

County by county. Wow, if Multnomah County had only one point, equal with the other counties here, Oregon would be solidly Republican.

Then the Dems would try to split up Multco into a bunch of little counties.