Chad Curtis reads water meters by day and works as a security guard by night, using the money to pay his graduate school tuition and take care of his five young children.
And during his free time, the Orem resident is embarking on a long-shot campaign to reform Utah's presidential election laws.
Curtis wants voters to discard Utah's winner-take-all Electoral College system for a proportional method.
"I want the electoral vote to match the vote of the people," he said.
But placing the proposal before Utahns won't be easy. Curtis has picked the ballot-initiative route, meaning he must collect more than 90,000 signatures statewide by June 1, and they can't all be from his Utah County community. He has to collect the signatures of 10 percent of voters in the last election in 26 of 29 state Senate districts.
So far, Curtis has about 18 volunteers and 1,000 signatures with less than two months to go. Neither political party has signed on to help, and no organized group has provided funding and volunteers.
"Utah is one of the hardest states to get an initiative on the ballot," he said. "I'm going for it anyway."
Curtis hopes to recruit hundreds of volunteers to collect signatures in a truly grass-roots effort.
His passion doesn't stem from his political persuasion - he leans Republican - but from his drive for electoral fairness.
"It is wrong to me that the minority vote is cast away in Utah," he said.
In almost all states, the presidential candidate who receives the greatest share of the popular vote receives all of the state's electoral votes. Each state receives one electoral vote for each member of Congress. Utah has five electoral votes.
In the past presidential election, all five went to President Bush because nearly three-fourths of Utah voters supported him. If Utah handed out those electoral votes proportionally, Bush would have received four and one would have gone to Democrat John Kerry.
Curtis's petition drive piggybacks on a failed 2004 Colorado amendment seeking proportional electoral votes. Amendment 36 failed by a 2-to-1 margin.
Utah's two main parties take two different views, which may stem from the Republican dominance in the state.
Utah Republican Party Chairman Joe Cannon didn't like the Colorado amendment, and he doesn't like Clifton's proposal, either.
"The system has worked pretty doggone well for the past couple of centuries," he said. "If it's not broken, don't fix it."
Weakening the Electoral College or abandoning it altogether would harm smaller states like Utah, he believes.
"If every state were proportional, no candidates would ever come to Utah or Wyoming or New Hampshire or Maine," he said. "I would hate to see Utah be in the forefront of trying to weaken the Electoral College."
Utah's Democratic Party isn't so hot on the Electoral College, said Chairman Wayne Holland.
He said the system has "significant faults" and a proportional system "would make our electoral system a much more representative of the voice of American instead of individual states."
Democratic state Rep. Roz McGee of Salt Lake City called the Electoral College "antiquated." With an integrated and technologically savvy country, "it's time we pay direct attention to every voter's vote," she said.
If Curtis can't collect the necessary signatures, he plans to lobby lawmakers like McGee to push the proposal on Capitol Hill.
McGee said she would like to be part of a coalition backing this reform in Utah and across the country.
mcanham@sltrib.com
