Republicans: they sure have initiative!

Since no one reads magazines anymore (I used to subscribe to about 15; now I get two or three) I really, really want to call attention to this:

At first glance, next year's Presidential election looks like a blowout.
But it might not be. Luckily for the incumbent party, neither George W.
Bush nor Dick Cheney will be running; indeed, the election of 2008
will be the first since 1952 without a sitting President or Vice-President
on the ballot. At the moment, survey research reflects a generic public
preference for a Democratic victory next year. Still, despite everything,
there are nearly as many polls showing particular Republicans beating
particular Democrats as vice versa. So this election could be another close
one. If it is, the winner may turn out to have been chosen not on November
4, 2008, but five months earlier, on June 3rd.

Two weeks ago, one of the most important Republican lawyers in Sacramento quietly filed a ballot initiative that would end the practice of granting
all fifty-five of California's electoral votes to the statewide winner.
Instead, it would award two of them to the statewide winner and the rest,
one by one, to the winner in each congressional district. Nineteen of the
fifty-three districts are represented by Republicans, but Bush carried
twenty-two districts in 2004. The bottom line is that the initiative, if
passed, would spot the Republican ticket something in the neighborhood of
twenty electoral votes—votes that it wouldn't get under the rules prevailing
in every other sizable state in the Union...

Read on. The filers of this initiative are a front group for the law firm of the Republican Party of California.