On August 8, 2011, Governor Brown signed AB459, committing California’s 55 electoral votes to the National Popular Vote Compact Between States, joining Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland, Vermont, Illinois, Washington State, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia in an agreement to cast all the electoral votes of the undersigned states in a presidential election for the candidate getting the most votes nationwide—the compact to be activated when the undersigned states totaled 270 electoral votes, the number required to elect a president.
I discussed this prospect in my Independent online op-ed piece Elect President by Popular Vote: (The most significant political development in generations that no one is talking about).
But it never occurred to me then that a supposedly responsible news publication, the “journalistic jewel” of Santa Barbara, would, after being properly notified, refuse to print the significant news that Brown’s signing this legislation into law brought the National Popular Vote compact to [132 votes, which is] within 49 percent of the necessary number to enable our country’s citizens to elect a president and vice-president by a national vote majority.
In addition to your editorial management, neither columnist Jerry Roberts nor Barney Brantingham could be induced even to mention this development despite its obvious interest to any Santa Barbara voter.
You should do better.