“Starbird, sit down.”

With these words, one of the most sagacious State House players of the 1960s, Perrin Edmunds, privately declared his impatience with Rep. Glenn Starbird. Starbird, a Democratic millworker from Kingman Township, could be long-winded and redundant. Near the end of the 1967 session, while monitoring House debates over his closed- circuit speaker in his secluded Executive Council Chambers sanctum, Edmunds discreetly verbalized what many others no doubt were also thinking.

Though often thoughtful and original, Starbird’s frequent interventions in legislative debate were unbecoming for a back bencher. No state representative, save more senior party floor leaders and Lewiston’s Louis Jalbert, the dean of appropriations, spoke more often in 1967. He was the legislator many, like Perrin Edmunds, would try to ignore.

It’s doubtful many of the 40 million people in California have heard of these luminaries who spoke more than Starbird: House GOP Floor Leader Harry Richardson, an architect of the Maine income tax, Democratic leader Emilien Levesque, later a prominent member of the Brennan and Longley administrations, or Jalbert.

But they might soon be hearing more about Glenn Starbird.

That’s because an idea Starbird successfully sponsored in his next term, in 1969, is giving rise to a citizen initiative campaign that may lead to a ballot referendum in California next June. If it passes, the proposal could tilt the balance in next year’s presidential election.

The measure, quite simply, would require 53 of California’s 55 electoral votes to be awarded by congressional districts, with the remaining two voting for the overall winner of the statewide outcome.

The proposal abolishes the “winner take all” system California, with one-fifth the number needed for the presidency, uses to cast electoral votes.

If the California referendum passes, it will take a page from a book written in Maine, when the 1969 Legislature enacted a bill sponsored by Starbird that mandated Maine’s four electoral votes be allocated one to each of our two congressional districts, and the remaining to the statewide winner. This is the footprint for the identical, though more far reaching, California proposal. Nebraska followed suit in 1991, but no other state has done so.

Though California’s effort is led by a group of partisan Republicans, the outcome would alter political landscapes for both parties, perhaps the entire country. The GOP is seen as the immediate beneficiary, since it would deprive one of America’s most reliably Democratic states of a claim on the block of 55 presidential electors.

In 2004, for example, California was a 55-vote shutout for Sen. John Kerry, awarding no electoral votes to President George Bush, even though Bush racked up 44 percent of the state’s popular vote. Under the new system, the outcome would have been 33 electoral votes for Kerry, 22 for Bush.

Though this change could move some of California’s electoral muscle to the GOP, and Democratic leaders oppose the plan, other Democrats see a benefit. That’s because they feel California so automatically votes for Democratic presidential candidates, the state loses a competitive edge when seeking attention of national party leaders. They’re tired of being taken for granted. California voices seeking federal support for earthquake research, for example, might no longer fall upon deaf ears if the state can again became a battleground.

In 1969, Maine legislators who considered this same electoral college reform now galvanizing California were surprisingly united in support of the measure. Though the State Government Committee, of which Starbird was a member, tinkered with his original proposal (his would have divided Maine into four presidential election districts, more completely doing away with the statewide element than the law as enacted) the bill emerged from committee with unanimous support. Starbird was uncharacteristically reticent.

Augusta Sen. Bennett Katz did take the Senate floor to note the historic occasion, referring to the unprecedented bill as “our first attempt to go in the direction of popular election of the president.”

Starbird left the Legislature in 1971, stepping down to accept appointment as Maine’s Deputy Commissioner of Indian Affairs, his district having included the Old Town home of the Penobscot Indians. He left state government in 1976 to devote the remaining years of his life to the Penobscots as a professional researcher and genealogist.

His death at age 66, one day after Memorial Day 1995, was also one day after the death of Margaret Chase Smith. Starbird’s public service legacy is not as great as hers, but he might still be remembered prominently if California voters implement the reform he championed.

Edmunds died of a heart attack at age 42 in 1967. He did not live to witness the unfolding of Starbird’s idea. Though often exasperated with the man who didn’t always know when to sit down, even Edmunds would no doubt share the pride many Mainers have in the concept Starbird originated more than a generation ago.

Paul H. Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of Maine’s political scene. He can be reached by e-mail: [email protected].