I haven't seen any discussion of this here at the Cafe, and though I don't really have much to add to Hendrik Hertzberg's excellent note in the New Yorker, I feel compelled to spread the word.

This initiative would change the way California apportions presidential electoral votes, from a statewide winner-take-all rule, as almost every other state does it, to a system where electoral votes are awarded to the winner in each congressional district. As Hertzberg writes, this would "spot the Republican ticket something in the neighborhood of twenty electoral votes — votes that it wouldn’t get under the rules prevailing in every other sizable state in the Union."

At a first, superficial glance, this seems more "fair" than awarding all 55 electoral votes to the winner, but as Hertzberg points out, the system is still winner-take-all, just on a district by district basis. And since big Republican states like Texas and Georgia aren't going to change the way they do it, the possible outcome would be to snatch a Republican victory in '08 from the jaws of ignominy and defeat.

This is not a shortcut to the elimination of the "injustice" of the electoral college, but it may just appear to be that to California voters if they aren't paying attention.