The Plot to Rig 2008

In California right now, there is a naked, out-in-the-open ploy to rig the 2008 presidential election – and it may succeed.

To understand how this works, we must venture back to the 18th century, and learn about the odd anachronistic leftover that Republicans are now trying to use in an attempt to thwart democracy. Back then, our founding fathers decided against the introduction of a system where US presidents would be directly elected, with the votes totted up in Washington, DC, and the winner being the man with the most. Instead, they chose a complex system called the electoral college. This stipulates that American citizens do not vote directly for a president. Instead, they technically vote for 539 state-wide "electors", who then gather six weeks after the election to pick the President.

The founders designed it this way for a number of reasons. They wanted the smaller states to have a say, so they gave them a disproportionate number of electoral college votes. They also believed that, in a country which,at the time, was largely isolated and illiterate, voters wouldn't know much about out-of-state figures, and would be better off picking intermediaries who could exercise discretion on their behalf.

It's the worst part of the Constitution, producing perverse results again and again. On four occasions there have been such big gaps between the national popular vote and the state-by-state electoral college votes that the candidate with fewer real supporters in the country got to be President. It happened in 1824, 1876, 1888 and – most tragically for the world – in 2000.

Today, the Republicans are trying to exploit discontent with the electoral college among Americans in a way that would rig the system in their favor. Currently every state except Maine and Nebraska hand out their electoral votes according to a winner-takes-all system. This means that if 51% of people in California vote Democrat, the Democrats get 100% of California's electoral votes; if 51% of people in Texas vote Republican, the Republicans get 100% of Texas' electoral votes.

The Republicans want to change this – but only in California. California has gone Democratic in presidential elections since 1988, and winning the Golden State is essential if the Democrats are going to retake the White House. So the Republicans have now begun a plan to break up California's electoral college votes – and award a huge chunk of them to their side.

They have launched a campaign called California Counts, and they are trying to secure a state-wide referendum in June to implement their plan. They want California's electoral votes to be divvied up not on a big state-wide basis, but according to the much smaller congressional districts. The practical result? Instead of all the state's 54 electoral college votes going to the Democratic candidate, around 20 would go to the Republicans.

If this was being done in every state, everywhere, it would be a big improvement. California's forgotten Republicans would be represented in the electoral college, and so would Texas's forgotten Democrats. But by doing it in California alone, they are simply giving the Republicans a massive electoral gift. Suddenly it would be extremely hard for a Democrat ever to win the White House; they would need a landslide victory everywhere else to counter this vast structural imbalance against them on the West Coast.

The Democrats in response shouldn't be trapped in the conservative position of defending the indefensible electoral college. There is an alternative way to reform it – one that would be fair to all parties. It used to be thought it was all but impossible to ditch the system because it would require a constitutional amendment, which needs the approval of two-thirds of both houses of Congress, plus three-quarters of state legislatures.

But then constitutional scholars realized there was another way. The Constitution only requires that each state must "appoint" its presidential electors "in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct". That leaves a glimmer of hope. The Campaign for a National Popular Vote is campaigning for every state simply to commit its delegates to the electoral college to vote 100 per cent for the candidate who wins the popular vote. This would render the electoral college a forgotten technicality.

It's very revealing that when the California state senate voted to introduce this genuinely democratic system last year, the Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed it, with the support of his party. Indeed, this bias is so blatant that the state Republican Party itself has now chipped in $80,000 to the campaign. One can only hope that the California Democratic Party is working as hard against this maneuver. . .