"We need a candidate that, you know, the day after the nomination, we don't close down our offices in 20 or 25 states, like we've been doing," Rudy said recently to the Republican Jewish Coalition. "We don't win the next election if we don't run a campaign in New York and California. I tell you, we don't."

As it turns out, a poll released Monday showed Giuliani losing California to Hillary Clinton by a 55%-39% margin. And as for his home state of New York — it's even worse, with Hillary beating Rudy by an astonishing 64%-30% margin in a poll released on Tuesday

A top official of the effort to steal up to 20 electoral votes in California sent out an email to supporters of the Rudy Giuliani campaign asking them to sign petitions to get the measure on the ballot. This could be a violation of federal election law, which prohibits coordination between Presidential campaigns and separate ballot issues. Top of the Ticket has the latest.

The missive, obtained by The Times' Dan Morain, is addressed, "Hello Fellow Rudy Supporter!" Its author, Tony Andrade, is a Republican activist who helped draft the electoral college initiative. Previously, he was among those who helped place the ultimately successful recall of Gov. Gray Davis on the ballot in 2003 [...]

Chris Lehane, a Democratic activist who is organizing the campaign to block the measure, said of the Andrade e-mail: “It sounds like something that the Federal Election Commission and Department of Justice will be very interested in seeing.”

Maria Comella, spokeswoman for Giuliani’s White House bid, previously has stressed that neither he nor his campaign has had anything to do with pushing the ballot initiative.

It's unclear how Andrade would have gotten a list of Giuliani supporters in California without some form of coordination. The initiative's new backers, most of them connected to Giuliani in one way or another, are running from this as fast as possible.

Veteran GOP strategist Ed Rollins, who is overseeing the attempt to put the initiative before voters, distanced himself from Andrade’s note.

“None of us has anything to do with any [presidential] campaign; we understand the law very, very well,” Rollins said. Pledging to try to “make sure that [the e-mail] gets stomped,” Rollins added, “We need to be very sensitive to the fact that people have speculated that this is part of the Giuliani campaign.”

When voters are read the title and summary of the proposed initiative, a solid majority opposes the measure - 53 percent would vote NO if the election were held today and only one out of five voters (22%) support the initiative while a quarter of the electorate (25%) is currently undecided. This is one of the lowest levels of support we have ever seen in our polling for a statewide initiative in California.

Of course, we wouldn't even be talking about this if it weren't for the splitting of the primary races allowing for a low-turnout election in the middle of the summer to be an inviting target for Republican dirty tricksters. The real reason for moving up the Presidential primary was not just to keep up with the Joneses and "make California heard" in the Presidential process - if that was the goal they're failing miserably - was to ensure that termed-out lawmakers could serve again in the Legislature, by putting the term limits change on the February ballot in time for them all to run again in June. And now that initiative is starting to falter. So the Legislature created the conditions for any number of pernicious Republican ballot measures because they wanted to stay in power - and now they may not even accomplish that.