The wicked witch is dead, at least for now.
The effort by California Republicans to steal the 2008 presidential election by ending the state's winner-take-all electoral votes system has fallen apart, at least for now.
According to the Los Angeles Times:
A proposed California initiative campaign that could have helped Republicans hold on to the White House in 2008 was a shambles Thursday night, as two of its key consultants quit.
Unable to raise sufficient money and angered over a lack of disclosure by its one large donor, veteran political law attorney Thomas Hiltachk, who drafted the measure, said he was resigning from the committee.
Hiltachk's departure is a major blow to the operation because he organized other consultants who had set about trying to raise money and gather signatures for the initiative. Campaign spokesman Kevin Eckery said he was ending his role as well.
There remained a chance that the measure could be revived, but only if a major donor were to come forward to fund the petition drive. However, time is short to gather the hundreds of thousands of signatures needed by the end of November. And backers said Thursday that they believed the measure was all but dead, at least for the 2008 election.
The Los Angeles Times piece continued:
Despite the attention the measure garnered after a report in the Los Angeles Times' political blog, Top of the Ticket, and in the New Yorker, it failed to attract significant financial support, perhaps because many Republican donors are less than energized this year, and perhaps because of the slowing economy.
"There is not a huge amount of donor interest in the measure for a variety of reasons," Wilson said. "I'm not willing to keep beating my head against the wall."
Let me suggest a reason-- the GOP got caught with its pants down, and the American people are not going to tolerate another GOP effort to steal a presidential election like it did in 2000 (Florida) and 2004 (Ohio).
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