This article in the Weekly Standard needs to be read and understood by everyone. (If you don't have a subscription, I have reprinted it here)
The Bush reelection campaign will want to begin paying serious attention to a scheme now underway in Colorado to alter the formula by which that state awards its votes in the Electoral College. Like 47 other states and the District of Columbia, Colorado has traditionally allocated its electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis--to whichever candidate secures a statewide popular plurality. (Maine and Nebraska give their overall popular ballot winner a two-electoral-vote "bonus" and then divvy up the remainder according to who comes out on top in each congressional district.) Thus it was that in 2000 George W. Bush, with 50.8 percent of Colorado's popular vote (to 42.4 percent for the second-place Al Gore), won the state's entire 8-vote Electoral College allotment.
Not incidentally, Bush's total Electoral College margin was a mere 5 votes: 271 to 266. And it ought to have been just 4; one Gore elector in the District of Columbia withheld his vote "in protest."
So, also not incidentally, Democrats who live in Colorado (financed almost entirely by Democrats who don't live in Colorado) are now collecting signatures for a November ballot initiative that would alter the state's Electoral College allocation formula--beginning with this year's presidential election.
Should the "Make Your Vote for President Count" initiative succeed, Colorado's electoral votes will be proportionally awarded according to its popular-vote results. If George W. Bush again wins 50.8 percent of Colorado's popular vote, for example, he'll be allowed to claim only 50.8 percent of its Electoral College delegation (rounded to the nearest vote), not the whole thing. And had this rule been in effect last time around, for further example, Bush and Gore would have split Colorado's electoral votes, 5 to 3--a 6-vote swing that all by itself would have put Gore in the White House.
To the obvious objection--that their plan looks and smells like the purest, rawest partisanship--its sponsors respond indignantly. It's a matter of simple principle, don't you know: "What we are proposing to do, at least in Colorado," says (Democratic campaign consultant) Rick Ridder, the initiative's lead operative, "is to come much closer to the notion of one-man, one-vote." And (Democratic) state senator Ron Tupa, a high school government teacher, agrees. How's he supposed to explain to his students an electoral process that elevates George W. Bush to the presidency despite the fact that Al Gore won more votes? "People can't understand why we have this kind of system that seems so outdated and hasn't been reformed in 200 years."
Funny then, isn't it, that Sen. Tupa & Co. are proposing a "reform" that works best, for their purposes, only if all the other states don't adopt it? Had a proportional-allocation system been in effect in Colorado--and nowhere else--on Election Day 2000, Al Gore would indeed have been elected president. But had the very same plan been in force throughout the country, it turns out it wouldn't have made much difference at all.
We've done the math: Bush would have lost a single electoral vote--to Ralph Nader--but Gore would still have been three votes short. In other words, the popular vote winner would still have been denied an ultimate victory. Surely this is not what the new Colorado initiative's backers (pretend to) have in mind.
