1115.org

The L.A. Times reports that Rudy Giuliani’s campaign may have been caught red-handed engaging in what — according to the laws of the land — constitutes election fraud. That is to say, in a violation of federal election law.

This pertains to the proposal to have Californians vote on a ballot initiative to split California’s 55 electoral votes by congressional district, instead of the current system whereby the winner gets all 55 votes. The idea being to make it well-nigh impossible for a Democrat to be elected President. Even with all 55 of California’s electoral votes, Democratic candidates struggle to get over the 270 vote hump to be elected president. If you siphon off 20 votes by splitting California’s (and only California’s) electoral votes, then the Presidential election becomes a crap-shoot with loaded dice. And that, of course, is the kind of crap-shoot Republicans much prefer to engage in.

The proposal appeared to have stalled several weeks ago, but it suddenly came back to life last week. And now we find that this resuscitation may have overtones of illegality:

We have noted before that one of the main bankrollers for Giuliani’s presidential campaign, Paul Singer, heavily financed the initial push to get on the state’s ballot an initiative that could help a Republican win the White House next year. Also, Anne Dunsmore, who until September was Giuliani’s deputy campaign manager in charge for fundraising, recently took over money chores for the ballot measure.

Friday, the Giuliani link to the initiative grew stronger. A key backer of the measure to alter California’s winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes sent an e-mail urging Giuliani backers to sign petitions to place it on the ballot.

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.

Democrats battling the electoral college measure already have filed complaints with the Federal Election Commission and U.S. Justice Department alleging the Giuliani campaign is behind the initiative. If true, that would be a violation of federal election law, which prohibits such coordination.

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.”

It seems the best defense that the Giuliani campaign initiative backers have to offer is that they are only breaking the spirit of the law, not the letter. The Giuliani campaign is not officially associated with, or coordinating, the ballot initiative.

However, the fact of the matter is that the stakes are perceived to be high enough that if violating the letter of the law — and risking fines and jail time — is what it would take to give the ballot initiative a sporting chance of passing, Republican foot-soldiers willing to do the needful would emerge.

We invite stunts like these by having such thoroughly ineffectual election laws.

Even in what we are used to regarding as backward countries, they recognize that penalties for violating election law have to be extreme, because the idea must be to make sure no one violates the law. Prosecuting violators, and making them pay what they regard as a small price for successful election tampering, doesn’t help a whole lot.

In India, for example, back in the day when they were really quite backward, when prime minister Indira Gandhi was convicted of a relatively minor election offense, she would have been forced to relinquish office. That’s when she decided to suspend democracy instead, and declared the equivalent of martial law.

Any and all violations must invalidate your election if you end up winning. That’s the only mechanism that has any hope of keeping elections relatively clean.

What we do is we simply offer crooked politicians a price list for election tampering. And that’s why you get stuff like the phone jamming scandal in the 2002 New Hampshire Senate election.

Crooked politicians have repeatedly shown that they find the current price list to be quite a bargain.