Let me address the points you raised in your comment above (Tom Yager said on June 23rd, 2008 at 7:10 am #):

TOM:
Chuck Giese admits that there are factors such as not having state-funded primaries or registration by party in many states that makes direct state-by-state comparisons very difficult.

ME (CHUCK):
What I admit is that “Efforts to craft democracy in the Green Party’s presidential preference process have failed in large part because” of these differences, and that “With so many ways to count who is a voter, it is challenging to ensure one-person, one-vote.”
It is a complex issue, which has led to many different ideas for solutions. But I heard a very good idea from David Best of D.C. way back on April 26, 2005 (3 yrs. ago), which solves the problems. I’ve supported it ever since, and that is what I suggested in the article. Each Green participating in their state’s presidential preference process gets the same weight assigned to their vote (i.e., in terms of delegate representation at the presidential nominating convention). The differences in election law between states affect the visibility and size of a state Green Party. But with the method suggested by David, the complex problem is solved and each Green voting in the presidential preference process gets the same share in the overall decision, regardless of which state they live in.

TOM:
… However, he discards these factors as irrelevant …

ME (CHUCK):
Tom, these factors are not irrelevant. I explained how they affect the visibility and size of a state party. But David Best’s method resolves the differences between states, giving each participating Green a vote with the same weight as that of any other participating Green, in any state. His method is elegantly simple, and with it, the election law differences cease to be a problem.

TOM:
… and basically says “screw the 45 Green parties without state funded primaries!”

ME (CHUCK):
The solution I’m advocating treats every participating Green equally, in every participating state. Each gets a vote having the same weight. Nobody is getting screwed in this scenario.
On the other hand, the current system gives Green presidential preference voters in the 5 bigger state parties (out of the first 21 parties with vote count data) only one convention delegate for 156 Green voters, while in the 16 smaller parties (of the first 21), the Green voters get one delegate for every five voters. So the Green voters in the 16 small states each get a vote with 31 times more delegate representation than the vote of each Green in the 5 larger parties.
So it seems to me that the Greens in the larger parties are getting screwed under the current system, being counted only as 1/31 of a small-state Green. But under the true one-person, one-vote system I’m advocating, each participating Green gets a vote with the same weight.
You have to do a better job explaining why my suggestion screws anybody.

TOM:
… His proposal for delegate apportionment at our convention directly compares apples to oranges.

ME (CHUCK):
Tom, the apples vs. oranges argument no longer applies. It has been used for years to support the assertion that a one-person, one-vote system was impossible due to the election law differences from state to state. The differing laws were the apples and oranges.
But now we have a solution: a true one-person, one-vote method that gives each Green an equal voice in the decision process, regardless of which state they live in.
If you want to continue to use the apples vs. oranges analogy to attack one-person, one-vote, you have to explain why a Green in one state should have a more powerful vote than a Green in another state.

TOM:
As for Nader, the deck was not stacked against him. He could have been on the ballot in Wisconsin and Maine if he had declared his candidacy in late January or early February. He could have been on the ballot in most of the other state nominating processes if he were seeking our nomination. He chose not to. I’m tired of Greens being blamed for Nader’s decisions.

ME (CHUCK):
Tom, you overlooked something here. My data had nothing to do with the fact that some states kept him off the ballot even before he declared as an independent. Those states where he competed gave him 38% of the total popular vote of the first 21 states with vote counts available. Yet because of the lack of one-person, one-vote, that 38% share of popular votes only gave him 31% of the delegates in the same 21 states. The other side of it is that McKinney got 21% of the popular vote in those 21 states, but it got her 46% of the delegates of those 21 states. *That* is how I was describing the deck as stacked against Nader. In those 21 states, he beat McKinney almost 2-to-1 in popular vote, yet trailed her in delegates by 3-to-2. It certainly looks like a stacked deck.

TOM:
The National Committee did not reject what Chuck calls “One Green, One Vote”. Chuck’s proposal to effectively make us into a one-state party at the convention (California would have received about 86% of the delegates!) was never made into a formal proposal, not even by his own Green Party of California.

ME (CHUCK):
The National Committee (NC) most certainly DID reject something that would have been marginally more fair. Prior to adopting the current delegate allocation formula, the NC voted down a slightly more fair proposal. The NC then approved an amended version that increased the minimum number of delegates per state from 5 to 8, to artificially boost the delegate counts of the many tiny state parties. (Half of the states have 8 delegates allocated.)
But even with the minimum of 5 delegates per state party, it would have been almost as bad as what we have now.
It is a weak defense of the NC to say that it never rejected one-person, one-vote, when in fact it wasn’t even willing to accept something even a tiny bit more fair than the grossly unfair system it did adopt.
Or maybe I should approach your claim from another direction. If you want to claim that the NC has not rejected one-person, one-vote, does that mean that you think the NC will accept this new idea for one-person, one-vote, once it is made into a formal proposal after next month’s convention? Will you support it? (It doesn’t sound like it, given your comments above.)

This sadly describes my experience with many GP “leaders.” Most have great academic ideas and ideologies. Some write great! issue papers, but they/we, (I’m a new GP member) only talk to each other.

It is impossible to grow a real political party this way.

157,565 registered Greens in California.

This means that California is entitled to have 52% say over the direction of the national Party. As of now, they have roughly 15%. This is not democracy.

When I was a Green I heard all kinds of asinine rebuttals to this fact such as: not all states have partisan registration (too miniscule of an amount to keep CA disenfranchised), we don’t want CA to tell the rest of us what to do (too bad, 52% of the voters should have 52% of the say regardless of geography).

I have also seen people who bring this up (and bring up the compliance of those in the 2004 election highjacking) dismissed as “rhetorical” “polemical” and “not nice”.

As Greens, we need to stay true to our core values. Decentralisation and Grassroots Democracy demand that we embrace “One Green, One Vote” and go from there.

Some attention needs to be paid to getting ballot access status to state Green parties. Ideally, this would be done at a grassroots level, not from a national level. Just because some states perform this calculus based on the results of Presidential elections does not mean we should hijack the Presidential nomination process to choose one star candidate over another. The past elections have given this appearance to many rank and files Greens, including myself, who pay attention to all the e-mail flame wars around the country.

It makes sense to me that the states who have organized and viable Green parties should represent the party at the national level. Then they can bring their expertise to other states to help them properly organize and overcome bureaucratic hurdles having gone through the experience themselves.

As for Nader, the deck was not stacked against him. He could have been on the ballot in Wisconsin and Maine if he had declared his candidacy in late January or early February. He could have been on the ballot in most of the other state nominating processes if he were seeking our nomination. He chose not to. I’m tired of Greens being blamed for Nader’s decisions.

The National Committee did not reject what Chuck calls “One Green, One Vote”. Chuck’s proposal to effectively make us into a one-state party at the convention (California would have received about 86% of the delegates!) was never made into a formal proposal, not even by his own Green Party of California.

The reason why you were “disappeared” had nothing to do with “voicing your dissent”. Plenty of delegates have expressed disagreement on our listservs without being penalized. You made all sorts of personal attacks on other delegates, often in the form of outlandish and thoroughly discredited conspiracy theories. Personal attacks on other delegates are not allowed under Proposal 186, which was passed by the National Committee in 2005. You knew the rules, you chose to break them, and then you turned around and whined about being held accountable. Comparing your treatment to prisoners at Guantanamo is appalling.

I wish Cynthia McKinney the best of luck in building her own organization!

Can you expand on this a bit please?

As a former Co-Chair who was Gitmo’d (Disappeared) by their undemocratic list moderators, who are accountable to no one, for voicing my dissent on some of the things Chuck talks about, I can honestly say I agree, as long as the old dead wood is still in command and minority rules, there will not be a grassroots movement in the GP. There are a core group of individuals who seem to feel they know what’s best for the party who have no intention of relinquishing their influence, and most candidates who are out busting their chops running for office, have no clue about the internal gyrations of the mis-leadership in the organization.

In essence, the 10 kvs. have become a selling feature and no more, looks good on paper and makes a great website, but that’s as far as it goes. People can talk about a perfect world but living it is a different story, and the GP has not yet evolved in that direction. If you were privy to the discussion lists or the hundreds of meaningless resolutions that have been written to quash dissent, you would certainly look for higher ground elsewhere.

I came into the organization because I believed in Ralph Nader, and I left because of him. He is the only leader I know of who truly walks his talk, and has done so for many decades. If there’s any hope at all, he is it. And the Greens were too stupid to recognize their 2nd, after 2004, and probably last, missed opportunity. Can’t keep making the same mistakes and expect a different outcome.

I wish Cynthia McKinney the best of luck in building her own organization!

Liz Arnone

Nothing said by people who equate Soviet prison conditions — which were admittedly harsh to the level of Andersonville for similar reasons — to Nazi death camps set up to implement a policy of extermination, will ever make any impression on me.

I am a student of Marx & Engels who rejects Lenin’s interpretation of same, but all this equation of the early Soviets with the Nazis is just stupid mouthing of Imperialist propaganda. The Zionists crack me up, always screaming about Soviet Anti-Semitism! When for decades the CPUSA was mainly populated by persons of Jewish nationality. When the Red Army in 1941 gave first priority access to Space Available on trains going east to Jews, leaving non-Jewish Poles/Belarussians/Ukranians to cope with German occupation best they could, on the basis they’d have a better chance to survive than Jews did under Nazis.
When without Stalin’s stupidity re Res 181 & Skoda Works firearms there’d be no “Israel”.

Is Dissident Voice a significant arena of Class Struggle? I think I detect some divergence of class outlook within the DV Editorial Bd itself. Same deal on Counterpunch, other “alternative media”: now aligned with Global Peon/gotta work to live class, now aligned with viewpt of privileged Usian Salaried Professionals/Digital Startuppers.

Question for me is whether time spent commenting onto DV is totally wasted, or just mostly wasted. Talking to members of another Class: any future in it? You tell me:)

For the time being lesser-evilisim will slow any new party’s growth as much as it has the Green Party. However, do we have a choice? This country is the engine of mass murder, torture and pain in the world. Our responsibility is to say not in our name, build a popular movement and electoral party which makes that happen.

We have to build a 3rd party movement which is broad. The Greens hyper-critical criticism of the “left” has led to a narrow support base because they are so terrified of people who can out organize them. Instead of learning how to organize they purge anyone whose leftism or history is too scary.

This is truly sad. Anyone older than 40 knows that todays advances are on the back of the left’s actions during the last 100 years. Those purist attitudes are one of the key reasons the Green Party has not grown.

There may not be a whole new national party coming out of the Nader campaign. I do expect, however, to see some of the folks frustrated with the weakness of the Green Party to put together some formation to mobilize resistance to empire.

This article shows the delegates are not being awarded on the basis of participation but on the basis of wish-full thinking. Something to keep in mind when the next party goes national.

Your suggestion of establishing different ratios for representation, based on whether a state has Green registration, is interesting.

In your June 21 comment, you point out that California’s presidential primary had 53,906 Greens voting, not 35,844 as I reported in my Table 1. Yes, you are correct. My footnote 1 (giving the source of Table 1 data) refers to a more detailed compilation of Green popular votes and delegates. If you follow the URL to that compilation, it does discuss the different Calif. Green voter numbers (35,844 vs. 53,906). The 18,062 vote difference represents Green primary ballots cast which marked other election choices (like ballot initiatives), but marked none of the Green presidential candidates. My Table 1 only used the 35,844 Green voters who marked one of the listed Green candidates for president. (Our primary was held Feb. 5, before Nader dropped out. I contained Nader, McKinney, Brown, Johnson, Mesplay, Swift, and Ball).

Even though those 18,062 voters did not mark any of the listed candidates, the GP of Calif. allocated all of its delegates to the listed candidates. I disagree with that policy. Since fully 1/3 of our Green primary voters did NOT mark a listed candidate, I think GP of Calif. should have only assigned 2/3 of our allotted 168 delegates to the listed candidates. Since GP of Calif. did not give representation to those 18,062 voters in our delegation to the nominating convention, I did not include those 18,062 voters in Table 1 because that would have skewed the voters per delegate figure. I did include those 18,062 voters in Table 2, under the “NOTA/NOC/Uncommitted/Blank” category — they make up the bulk of that category.

I appreciate that you took the time to double-check the numbers, and that you pointed out the 53,906 total Green primary ballots cast.

DB, thanks for upgrading/sharpening my point, esp. re Demock Now.

I myself don’t know what to do. Is there a way Home Sapiens Sapiens can get out of the predicament they’ve created for themselves and the rest of Organic Life On Earth?

Is there a Leadership with a completely sound take on The Totality, which of course must include deep understanding of unique/special features of USian racist ideology & practices, esp. vis a vis Slavery/Jim Crow/Incarceration, Manifest Destiny, & Zionist Power Config?

Petras: used to regard him as My Teacher, “you teacher-me pupil”, till I read his casual dismissal of the possibility that workingclass/peonclass Tibetans might have a beef about all the Han Chinese flooding into the country, taking over everything. Doesn’t the UN Charter & the Decl. of Human Rts say sthg about a conquering power moving its own citizens into territory occupied by force?

But Teacher don’t allow no dumb questions into his TRASHBUCKET, he said in ALL CAPS. So guess I’m on my own…?

Sincerely,

PERFECT NOBODY;)

http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/sov/2008_primary/05_voter_stats_by_party_feb08.pdf

At this point, its probably more accurate to refer to a 12th party or a 13th party we’ve got so many of the things.

We work in a winner-take-all system. And its going to stay that way until someone knocks one of the two monopoly parties out. So, we have to be smart and work effectively in that system.

In that respect, its absolutely suicidally stupid to have three major ‘opposition’ candidates running in this election. By those three I’m referring to McKinney(Green), Nader (Independent), and Barr (Libertarian).

The day we get serious is the day we combine all of these into one opposition campaign to corporate rule in America.

I like both Ms. McKinney and Mr. Nader. But its incredibly useless and stupid to have both campaigns going at the same time. They have to unify.

And, I know few on the left will agree, but we need to extend that unity to Libertarians and others on the right who oppose seeing the nation go into foreign wars and the massive expansion of government power. Believe it or not, there’s a lot of common ground there. Certainly enough to combine in a movement that has the narrow goal of fixing our democracy and getting us back to free and fair elections that really represent the people.

We need numbers of support so big they can’t keep us out of the debates. You can’t do that split three ways or more in an election.

We need numbers of support that we can win a three way winner take all election. You can’t do that split three ways or more in an election.

Lets compare say CA to GA. In CA, the Greens are on the ballot in the state-wide primary. So, its relatively easy to request a Green ballot and participate in the Green Primary.

In GA, there is no statewide primary. As the article says, officially the Green Party is nearly invisible. To participate, first you have to know that there is a Green Party State Convention that’s going to occur, and when and where it is. Then you have to travel perhaps all the way across the state to be there.

Given this, is it fair to compare “green voters per delegate” between the two states?

In fact, I notice GA is so invisible that it doesn’t even make the list in the article. I don’t live there anymore, but I’d be surprised if there wasn’t still a state convention sending delegates to the national.