Stealing electoral votes

It looks as though the Republicans are surreptitiously stealing electoral votes. From the New Yorker:

Two weeks ago, one of the most important Republican lawyers in Sacramento quietly filed a ballot initiative that would end the practice of granting all fifty-five of California’s electoral votes to the statewide winner. Instead, it would award two of them to the statewide winner and the rest, one by one, to the winner in each congressional district. Nineteen of the fifty-three districts are represented by Republicans, but Bush carried twenty-two districts in 2004. The bottom line is that the initiative, if passed, 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.

It's worth pointing out that that's almost as many electoral votes as the State of Florida (27) which has been the swing state in the last two elections. If this initiative goes through, we will have just given the Republicans almost the equivalent of the entire state of Florida.