winner take all; suppose you have six out of 10 voting dem. do a split instead of winner take all - and you end up taking a hit on the ev count of 40 percent of the evs you would have otherwise had. california is noteworthy because its a big electoral prize. Even if its only 10 percent here thats still alot of EVs.

Is california the state with the most EVs? I thought it was Cali or Florida, those two. Not sure which one is bigger?

The problem is, Populism2008, that if every state awarded electors by district, we'd have a permanent Republican presidency. It's not at all proportional, except insofar as each Republican vote ending up being worth some proportionally greater amount than each Democratic vote because of the way districts are set up.

For Presidential electoral reform, the proposal that states form a 270+ EV pact to award electors to the winner of the popular vote is by far the best and only thing thing to push for (at least for now).

That's a good question.

As for the rest, it's all well and good to say we should push for similar amendments in red states, but other states don't have California's crazy ballot proposition process, so there's zero chance that Texas, say, would do anything similar.

The situation is similar to the dilemma of nonpartisan redistricting. California makes it more possible to do, but no red states would follow along, so the Democrats would be unilaterally disarming (or being disarmed with the help of the Republican proponents of a ballot measure).

We have two primaries in 2008.  The Presidential Primary in February, and the regular in June.  The initiative would most likely be on the June ballot and go into effect immediately on passage so it would affect the 2008 election, unless:

(1) it fails a court challenge because it was passed by the people, not the legislature (U. S. constitution, Article II, Section 1, second paragraph states:

Each state shall appoint, in such as manner as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors ...

(my emphasis on legislature) or

(2) another measure (yet to be proposed) on the November 2008 ballot negates it.

Much as I'd support changing the constitution, state-by-state changes are a lot more realistic... and making those state laws contingent on other states adopting the same plan seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable approach to the "disarmament problem" faced in changing them one at a time.

Yeah, it probably won't happen even by state laws.
Yeah, there's the risk that a state will do something unilaterally bad through one party's power grab.
...but it's still SOME kind of progress.

Keep in mind this is likely to be on the second primary in June 2008, not on the first (Presidential) primary in February.  We need to focus on informing the voters and getting them to turn out.  

See here for a look at what is circulating so far.  

I thought only Gov Mike Easley had the veto in NC, but apparently so does Howard Dean. He should have kept his nose out of NC.

We had a chance to pick up 3-6 EVs for the Democrats with this bill, but Dean and the DNC killed it.  We have worked for years to get this bill passed.  It passed 3 votes in the state senate and 2 votes in the house.  We were 2 hours away from the final house vote when it got pulled off the agenda.  What a grat way to keep NC Democrats motivated and enthusiastic. Thanks a lot, Howard.

I like this idea much better than either the interstate compact plan, or the EV by CD idea.

Still there are problems. It would result in a lot of small states getting ignored. Under this plan, the fewer EVs a state has the more the vote has to swing to change the outcome. In a lot of small states, one party is strong enough to get at least 40% of the vote, but not quite strong enough to get 50%. Take Wyoming. It has 3 EVs. The Democrats can keep the vote above 33% without much trouble, but they'll never win, so the split will always be 2-1 in favor of the Republican. The problem is worse in a state with 4EVs, where one party can easily get 25%, but could never get 50%, meaning the vote would always be 3-1. Candidates would focus their attention on larger states, where a swing of 5-10 percentage points would mean several votes, as opposed to states where it would take a herculean effort just to get just one more.

Under California law, when two (or more) contradictory propositions on the same subject are both passed, the one with the most votes prevails over the other.