As Brad points out, it looks like the attempt by California Republicans to rig next year's presidential election has failed. The initiative, which would have gone on the June 2008 ballot, would have allocated electors by congressional districts instead of statewide. In a Democratic state, that would have given Republicans twenty plus electoral votes they might not have otherwise secured. The two top officials of Californians for Equal Representation, the organization working to gather signatures for the initiative, quit yesterday after reports revealed that the group's only significant funding had come from a shadowy Missouri group run by a Rudy Giuliani supporter. According to the Los Angeles Times, the officials claimed that they were quitting because the Missouri group would not reveal where it got the $175,000 it donated to the campaign, but it's also likely that they had become pessimistic about raising the $2 million necessary to put an initiative on the ballot. The initiative had already energized Democrats, while gaining little support from the state's Republicans, including Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. "In principle, I don't like to change the rules in the middle of the game," the governor had said about the initiative. The irony is that the California measure, if adopted nationally, would provide a more equitable way to choose presidents than the current system, but if adopted piecemeal, as the California initiative proposed to do, would merely benefit one party over another. --John B. Judis