More on that ballot initiative. It turns out that it's funded by an organization called "The People's Choice for President," which sounds like a really bad reality TV series, but just has the potential to spread some really bad reality. It's actually based in San Francisco, and largely funded by Jorge Klor de Alva, former president of the University of Phoenix, and now President of the Brazilian University, Faculdade Pitagoras. He's on the board of the Apollo Institute, a company that creates and runs for-profit colleges and universities, such as the two mentioned above.

The Colorado organization is known as Make Your Vote Count, a peculiar name for an organization that would dilute the value of your vote by about 90%.

The group chose Colorado to start because, obviously, it's ridiculously easy to get an initiative onto the ballot here. Initiatives are subject to review by the State Supreme Court, on a number of grounds. In the past, initiatives have been denied becuase they dealt with more than one subject, but that doesn't seem to apply here.

Of course, one other state where it's notoriously easy to put things on the ballot is California. The fact that a California-based group chose to conduct experiments here in Colorado suggests that it's not fairness or national reform that motivates them so much as those four electoral votes. After all, is Bush were to poll 45% in California, he might win as many as 25 of that state's electoral votes under the system they want to impose here.

Some of this has been reported earlier, but I don't think people really the whole thing seriously until they showed up with 130,000 names. The Denver Post has shown some integrity by editorializing against the measure (on the editorial page, no less), on June 16 of this year.