Cowboy Confessional

The good people of California should do what is right, what is fair, and what is not in their self-interest.

In the rich and colorful history of American election rigging, few schemes achieve a status more notorious than the winner-take-all system for hijacking electoral college votes. You would have to travel to my native South and resurrect Jim Crow to find tools that better suited to disenfranchised selected groups of voters. Removed of flowery rhetoric, the winner-take-all system is a naked power grab specifically designed to rob people of political representation.

Winner-take-all lotteries did appear until parties and partisans oozed from the political fundament. Nary a state rigged their election thus until the 1830s. Political parties began to form and party leaders determined they had the constitutional power — though perhaps not moral right — to award all electoral college votes to their party, even when their clan won slim majorities. In effect they sought to disenfranchise upwards of 49.9% of voters in their states.

This grimy gimmick was wildly popular in the South after Reconstruction. As black votes consolidated, racists legislators argued that the winner-take-all system effectively negated black representation. Though race-base biasing is less the norm today, our winner-take-all system still achieves its objective, eliminating representation based on party affiliation, political philosophy, or geographic region within a state.

For small, homogeneous states, winner-take-all cabals are less problematic — splitting Wyoming three electoral college votes is largely a non-issue for their predominantly white and rural voters. California is a different creature. Our population is large, diverse, and politically estranged. We have a broad mix of political thought ranging from utter liberals to utter libertarians, urban and rural interest, farmers, industrialists, artists, and a veritable melting pot of races. Pretending that all these diverse interests are fairly represented by consolidating California’s 55 electoral votes masks underlying partisan power grabs.

I know Democrats in my home state of Florida felt that way when its winner-take-all system sent George W to the White House in 2000.

To give you a sense of how senseless the winner-take-all hustle is, consider this: It is theoretically possible for a candidate to win an election campaigning in only eleven states and ignoring everyone else. Add up the electoral college votes in California (55), Texas (34), New York (31), Florida (27) Illinois (21), Pennsylvania (21), Ohio (20), Michigan (17), Georgia (15), New Jersey (15), and North Carolina (15), and you hit the magical 271 needed to take occupy the Command and Chief’s chair. Thirty nine states are, for practical purposes, meaningless. When applied to California, the winner-take-all system makes 36 of our 58 counties meaningless (sorry Modoc and Sierra, you don’t matter).

Practical reasons exist to scrap this unfair and antiquated system. Aside from balancing competing perspectives, we would encourage national candidate to campaign in California. Considered a ‘safe” state, no candidate for national office bothers to visit us during an election, as doing so is a waste of time and money. California voters lose the opportunity to question, challenge and chide these absentee candidates. The winner-take-all system also blocks third party candidates from gaining footholds, given that organizing in smaller geographic areas is their best hope for initial success. If you have ever thought of voting the Green, Libertarian or (God help you) the Natural Law party but decided not to “waste your vote”, you have our winner-take-all system to blame.

It has been said that California leads the nation in thought. Now is the time to prove that to the country, and to the other 47 states who disenfranchise their minority voters as we do.

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