Republican operatives in California have cooked up a dirty trick that looks like an election reform measure. They are trying to put an initiative on the ballot to divide the state’s 55 electoral votes between the winner and loser in next year’s presidential race, replacing the current winner-take-all method.

The reason it’s a dirty trick, as the Editorial Page noted recently, is that they are not trying to reform the Electoral College nationally — or to divide the electoral votes of Republican states like Texas. The initiative aims at rigging the Electoral College so that even if the Democrat wins the national popular vote by a wide margin, she or he might still lose the presidency.

The measure is so clearly anti-democratic that even prominent Republicans like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger have steered clear of it.

The initiative’s shadowy organizers –who are funded by big Republican donors — are trying to get the initiative on the ballot in large part through paid petition gathering.

There have already been reports that petition gatherers are using a variety of ruses to try to convince voters to sign — including putting a stop-the-war petition on top of it.

Now, as The Times reported today, there are charges that petition gatherers are going to shelters on Skid Row and offering homeless people Snickers bars and instant noodles in exchange for their signatures.

If the charges are true, the petition gatherers may have broken the law. There’s also the harsh irony that the people trying to buy the votes of the homeless are working to put a party in power that opposes the interests of the poor.

Most of all, though, it’s just creepy to buy hungry people’s political assent by dangling food in front of them.

Now, those who sign petitions in our fair state (California) must be registered voters.  Such registered voters need to have a mailing address at a permanent residence which a homeless shelter is not.  Therefore these homeless people are being registered on the spot just so they can sign a petition.  I've never seen petition signatures checked via mail after I've signed them.  Are the Republicans worried that the same homeless might go cast a ballot in some election that could do them damage? No, what the GOP does often is get people disqualified by mailing voter verification checks often to the 'homes' of college age students and troops that are deployed to Iraq.  When the mail is not returned from the home address the voter is disqualified and the ballot is thrown out if the voter comes back or uses an absentee ballot.  All of this is done, silently.  The first hint of a problem might be when the people managing a polling place hands a person a provisional ballot at the polling site.  Even then most people would think it's just a snafu, but they've been effectively disenfranchised mostly for living in a district that usually votes Democratic.

Note what commenter says at the Board Blog:

Let’s see, first Republican-funded signature gatherers use candy and noodles to bribe vagrants to register as voters and sign their petitions. Later, I suppose, (but between signature verification and the General Election) comes the Republican-funded first class mailings to all of them, which if not deliverable will be used to purge their names from California’s files of registered voters. Gotta be vigilant about that “voter fraud”, y’ know.

— Posted by Linda

Yup, that's about it.