#americans elect

[name204act]

U.S. Election Preview: The electoral college explained

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U.S. Election Preview: The electoral college explained

미 대선 방식… 선거인단 수 및 대선 결과 좌우하는 소수의 유권자들

Americans elect their president differently compared to other democratic countries. They do so indirectly t

[politicalsmokeout]

The Americans Elect partisans

The "Americans Elect" movement, an attempt to find a third-party centrist candidate for president, fizzled out ignominiously. After the group went to a lot of trouble to qualify for the ballot in 28 states, its much-hyped online primary to pick a presidential nominee ended without anyone actually being chosen.

Now the group is apparently trying to deregister as a political party in those 28 states, including South Dakota.

Don't tell that to two residents of South Dakota's 20th legislative district, which runs west from Mitchell and north to Wessington Springs.

Two people in that district are South Dakota's only two registered Americans Elect Party members, according to files compiled by Secretary of State Jason Gant.

It's the smallest political party in the state that's broken out into its own category, rather than being lumped into "other." (It's almost certainly not the actual smallest party — the "other" category probably includes a lot of one-person political parties, including a lot of gag references put down by self-styled wits when registering to vote.)

Inside District 20, Americans Elect actually ties with the Constitution Party, which also has two Mitchell-area members. But the Constitution Party is a juggernaut compared to AE; it has a full 330 registered members across the Mount Rushmore State.

After their attempt to run a presidential campaign failed, on Aug. 2 Americans Elect sent Secretary of State Jason Gant a letter asking to "terminate as a political party," Gant said.

But there's no provision in law to allow a political party in South Dakota to self-terminate.

Gant:

SDCL 12-1-3(10) defines political party as a party whose candidate for Governor at the last preceding general election at which a Governor was elected received at least two and one-half percent of the total votes cast for Governor.

The problem with Americans Elect is that in Section 7.3 of their by-laws, the only offices eligible for nomination by Americans Elect shall be President and Vice President of the United States and no other federal, state, county or local office.

Since there is no provision in law to terminate a political party, except the two and one-half percent of the total votes cast for Governor, Americans Elect will be a recognized South Dakota political party through the 2014 Gubernatorial race. 

[govgaryjohnson-blog]

It is vital that voters in every state have real choices in November, choices that are not narrowed down for them by the two so-called major parties.

[shortformblog]

We assumed no debt and we end this campaign with money in the bank. Once again, we ran like we intended to serve. We received contributions averaging less than $50 each from thousands and thousands of Democrats, Republicans and Independents in all 50 states.

We were not included in a single one of the 23 nationally televised GOP debates, and yet received 7% of the popular vote in a national poll conducted just a few weeks ago. My team was amazing and I thank you.

Roemer nearly won ballot access on the Americans Elect ticket, being the lead candidate in their online vote. But Roemer did not reach the minor party's threshold, and they shut down a couple weeks ago. Wonder if he'll make a run for it in 2016.

[votifi]

Why Americans Elect is a Success and not a Fail

By Lou Aronson

Americans Elect did not fail. The group and its followers launched themselves headlong into the rapidly changing intersection of politics, democracy and technology. Although they fell short of the goal of fielding a candidate in 2012 AE demonstrated some of the potential of how technology can reshape little “d”emocracy.  

I recently left the full time practice of law and started Votifi, a technology start-up focused on the political space.  I have closely followed a number of new ventures seeking to disrupt the way politics as usual is done in the United States. I have been fortunate to meet and learn about companies like PopVox, ElectNext, Ruck.Us, TurboVote and PolicyMic to name a few. It’s been a fascinating journey.  

We came across AE early in its evolution as it attempted to launch a political movement by using the Internet to develop a centrist platform and crowd source the identification of a viable candidate for president.  While I am no strong advocate of third party politics, I believe AE is onto something.

Yet when AE announced it was abandoning its nomination process because it was unable to attract enough support for any single candidate, pundits wailed that AE’s failure is yet another sign of the broader, irreparable dysfunction of the American political system. 

Change does not happen overnight and politics are slow to adapt. For context, in 2004 Howard Dean’s innovated how campaigns can use the Internet to organize disconnected groups of supporters around the country.  In 2008 the Obama campaign showed how social networks can add steroids to the manner in which campaigns can raise money and recruit and deploy volunteers.  If the 2008 campaign was about change, then change is definitely something we have seen since then: the Tea Party movement emerged; the Occupy Wall Street also emerged, and in just a few years iPads, Kindles and other tablets are now in over 20% of American homes. 

In this light, the AE campaign has been a watershed moment in the technological revolution happening in politics. AE demonstrated what is possible by using the Internet to gather signatures, donations, candidates (even if many were fringe) and ballot access against huge headwinds and a deeply entrenched, archaic and complex nominating process.  Their accomplishments are impressive irrespective of the outcome. We are most likely going to see future efforts to further erode the inertia of that system because of what AE accomplished.

Startups seldom finish-up where they thought they would when they launched. AE is probably no different.  They are tapping into the seismic shifts already impacting organizing, fundraising and campaign finance, and the ability to access huge amounts of data in order to make better decisions in public policy and government.  New companies, like mine, are being formed with the aim of altering the landscape and interactions between politicians and constituents as well as among constituents.

Adoption and virality, except in a few rare cases, doesn’t happen overnight. But it eventually does happen (consider civil rights and same sex marriage). The Internet facilitated massive changes in revenue models for a number of businesses: goodbye Blockbuster, hello Netflix; hello Amazon and goodbye Borders. But even these disruptions took time. With the amount of money pouring into politics today, existing institutions and processes are bound for disruption. For example I doubt that voters will sit idly by while millions of dollars of corporate money funds SuperPACs that can change close races overnight with huge ad buys.  One startup that might disrupt that process is Moat, which is adding transparency to ad networks.  I am sure more will emerge.

In the same week that AE “failed” we saw Facebook with its 900 million members go public.  What is amazing about Facebook isn’t just that in less than ten years it launched the largest tech IPO in history. What amazes me is that today almost half of all Facebook users access the site from their mobile phone, disrupting Facebook’s own revenue model.  Facebook is now thinking about developing its own mobile phone device, which we may see as early as 2013.

Is there any reason to think that mobile phone penetration will not have the same transformative effect on politics and democracy as it has had on social networks in general?

Technology will continue to facilitate connectivity that will empower us to demand that politicians and the political process in this country live up to their promise and their promises.  So I applaud AE as trailblazer in the technology revolution that could yield improvements in the political process by empowering Americans in a way that has never been seen before.  It truly is an exciting time to be an American and to be working in the space of technology, democracy and politics.

[thecommongoodusa-blog]

Want to end partisan politics? Here’s what won’t work — and what will

By Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, Washington Post, Op-Ed, May 17 - Political dysfunction. Partisanship at record levels. Attack politics run amok. And public approval of Congress scraping the single digits (Sen. John McCain is fond of saying it’s down to blood relatives and paid staff).

We’ve all heard the laments — we’ve made some of them ourselves — that Washington is broken, that our political system can’t grapple with the nation’s big, long-term problems. So what can be done about it? Unfortunately, the cures that get tossed around are often misguided, sometimes even worse than the disease. Here are five much-praised solutions we should avoid, followed by four that have a chance to make a meaningful difference.

1A third party to the rescue

Ah, if only we had a third force, an independent movement that could speak plain truths to the public and ignite the silent, centrist majority around common-sense solutions.

Sound familiar? In recent decades, Ross Perot, John Anderson and George Wallace have pursued a serious third-party route, although only Wallace managed to win any electoral votes. But that hasn’t stopped high-profile columnists such as Tom Friedman of the New York Times and Matt Miller of The Washington Post from singing this siren song, along with former elected officials such as Republican Christine Todd Whitman, Democrat David Boren and many others. The much-hyped Americans Elect group — which was to harness the democratic spirit of the Internet to find a centrist third-party presidential candidate for the 2012 race — is a prime example of this approach.

One problem: Despite Americans’ disgust with our politics, about 90 percent of us identify with — or at least lean toward — one of the two major parties. Among Americans who call themselves independent, two-thirds lean to one of the parties, and behave at the polls just like the partisans. So the core audience for a third party is perhaps 10 percent of the electorate. So-called independents are classic referendum voters; when times are bad, they want to throw the bums out rather than carefully attribute responsibility or parse alternatives.

The third-party fantasy is of a courageous political leader who could persuade Americans to support enlightened policies to tax carbon; reform entitlements; make critical investments in education, energy and infrastructure; and eliminate tax loopholes to raise needed revenue. But there is simply no evidence that voters would flock to a straight-talking, independent, centrist third-party candidate espousing the ideas favored by most third-party enthusiasts. Consensus is not easily built around such issues, and differences in values and interests would not simply disappear in a nonpartisan, centrist haze.

Just ask Americans Elect, which was unable to coalesce around a single candidate, despite spending $35 million.

===Read The Rest of the Editorial===

Want to end partisan politics? Here’s what won’t work — and what will

[sarahlee310-blog]

In looking to find a viable, centrist, third-party presidential candidate for moderates who feel left out by both the Democratic and Republican parties, Americans Elect was drawing on roughly two percent of all registered voters for its base of support. As such, it is unsurprising Americans Elect was unable to generate sufficient participation to produce a nominee. While the idea that the two major parties have both abandoned the center may be popular in the opinion sections of several prominent news organizations, that idea does not have much traction with the American people.

[antisyzygy-blog]

Was it ever alive?