A LITTLE SUBTLETY PLEASE?

Here's one to wrap your brain around. We all know about the electoral college right? Remember campaign 2000, or have we all started donating boxes of those memories to Goodwill to make room for new ones? The electoral college is the current "constitutional" process by which we elect one to the "most important" office in American politics. If you're not familiar with how this stuff works head on over to How Stuff Works to find out how all this stuff works. Suffice it to say, some of our founding fathers supposedly thought that choosing a president by popular vote was too reckless and some of our other Founding Fathers believed that having congress choose our president was too terrifying. So every state was assigned a number of electors equal to the number of that state's congressman and representatives. In 2000 many voters were shocked to find out that although George W. Bush had not received the majority of the popular vote, he would still be our President. Many supporters of Bush used the constitution to uphold this decision siting that the system was set-up this way and changing it would be unconstitutional.

California holds 55 electoral votes, the most in the nation. Traditionally all 55 electoral votes are given to the candidate that wins the state's popular vote - a Democrat in the last 4 presidential elections. Enter the Presidential Election Reform Act. A ballot initiative that would give one electoral vote to the winner of each of California's 55 congressional districts. If this initiative is passed The Republican Party is poised to receive about 20 electoral votes even if they lose the state as a whole to Democrats. This is equal to winning a state such as Ohio, or Pennsylvania, or Illinois; or even winning in 2 Marylands, Minnesotas, or Arizonas; or winning 1 Utah, 1 Iowa, 1 of the Dakotas, 1 Maine, and a Delaware in a pear tree.

The people supporting the Presidential Election Reform Act claim that it will make the electoral process fairer and more democratic. Which might be true because it seems the Democratic party is up to the same shenanigans in North Carolina - a state that notoriously leans Republican. The Democratic controlled State Legislative branch took up a bill that would restructure the voting process in the same way.
In this example there are a mere 15 electoral votes up for grabs as compared to the behemoth that is California's 55.

What is going on here? Have elections really been turned into an arbitrary scoring system based on statistic and demographics. Candidates choose which regions to campaign in and which ones to not waste their money on based on historical voting outcomes. Talking points and campaign speeches are littered with hot button issues that statistically rally a certain group of voters. Now they're realizing that through clever redistricting they can score a few extra points than usual and "steal" elections.

What makes all of this electoral juggling so easy to accomplish is a 2 party system. Anyone can juggle 2 balls; it takes much more skill to juggle even just one more. Give us Red, Blue AND White candidates and see how hard it would be to shuffle our votes from one side to the other now.