...the idea of stealing California's electoral votes was too good for the national GOP big-wigs to let fail. All it needed was a mischievous millionaire to rescue the scheme from the incompetents.

That's when Darrell Issa came riding in on his white elephant to save the day. Issa, a conservative Republican who has represented the 49th Congressional District in northern San Diego County since 2001...

In 2003, he spent $2.3 to bankroll the signature-gathering effort to recall Gov. Gray Davis, who had barely won re-election the previous November. Issa expected to run for Davis' job, but he was pushed aside by Schwarzenegger.

Now he's back on the scene, ponying up and raising the bucks needed to resurrect the GOP's dirty tricks scheme to divide California's electoral votes, which Issa and his pals now call the California Counts campaign. The New York Times reported that Issa made an initial $50,000 contribution to the initiative and was actively soliciting contributions from others. The San Jose Mercury News reported that soon after Issa stepped into the campaign in late October, it had nearly $2 million in the bank...

If the GOP initiative gets on the June ballot, Democrats will have to spend millions of dollars trying to defeat it. And if a majority of California voters support the June initiative, whichever candidate wins the Democratic nomination will be forced to spend a lot of money and a lot of time in the state that would otherwise have been targeted elsewhere.

This is clearly something the Democrats would like to avoid...

As Harvard historian Alexander Keyssar recently wrote in The Los Angeles Times:

"If the Republicans truly believe that it would be fairer and more democratic to choose electors by district, then instead of introducing such plans piecemeal in states where they would benefit, they should introduce a constitutional amendment to create a national district system -- one that would apply to Texas and South Carolina as well as California."