WAPO - Moderate Americans Elect group hoping to add third candidate to 2012 election ballot

[@DCGoldPants]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/moderate-americans-elect-group-hoping-to-add-third-candidate-to-2012-election-ballot/2011/11/21/gIQAtPpMtN_story.html

Moderate Americans Elect group hoping to add third candidate to 2012 election ballot

By By Krissah Thompson, Published: November 24

The restless political middle — emboldened by the recent inability of a special congressional committee to agree on a debt-reduction deal — is staking out a controversial plan to insert itself into the 2012 election.

A bipartisan group of political strategists and donors known as Americans Elect has raised $22 million and is likely to place a third presidential candidate on the ballot in every state next year. The goal is to provide an alternative to President Obama and the GOP nominee and break the tradition of a Democrat-vs.-Republican lineup.

The effort could represent a promising new chapter for political moderates, who see a wide-open middle in the political landscape as congressional gridlock and bitter partisan fights have driven down favorability ratings for both parties.

“Voters are saddened by the inability of people in Washington to deal with the issues that are important to them,” said the group’s chief executive, Kahlil Byrd, a Republican strategist who once worked for Massachusetts Gov. Deval L. Patrick (D).

Americans Elect has ballot slots in Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio and five other states, with certification pending in several others.

The group is relying on an ambitious plan to hold a political convention on the Internet that would treat registered voters like fans of “American Idol,” giving everyone a shot at picking a favorite candidate.

“We want to gather millions of people and allow them to run authentically through the process,” Byrd said, calling it a “wide-scale draft movement for presidential candidates.”

Unlike the Green Party, Americans Elect is not creating a separate party, but trying to change the political process in two ways. First, the group seeks to create a mixed-party ticket, requiring its presidential candidate to pick a running mate from a different party.

Second, Americans Elect — which was formed and is backed by Peter Ackerman, a wealthy private investor and philanthropist, along with Byrd — wants to take the nominating process out of the hands of a few primary voters and make it more open through the use of technology. Registered voters who sign up on the group’s Web site would directly nominate and select candidates online in the spring. A final nominee would be selected in June.

All of this has the potential to affect the 2012 election, said Nicco Mele, who lectures at Harvard University on technology and politics and helped build an online following for former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean.

Americans Elect’s online nomination process could be “potentially disruptive” to the presidential campaign, he said.

No candidates for the Americans Elect nomination have officially declared, but some prominent people are associated with the effort, including former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman ®, who serves on the group’s board of directors.

More from the link.

[Teller]

I'm intrigued.

[thebluefood]

Sign me up! If we can't add more political parties into the mix, this seems to be the next best thing. Hopefully, this will give us in the middle a larger voice in Washington.

[artmonkforHOF]

About damn time, the current 2 party system is a joke, just look at what has come out of Washington in the last week: pizza is a vegetable, and no one can agree on budget cuts even after they formed a special committee to deal with that one problem.

The only thing I would recommend to this new party or whatever you would call it, is to try and separate themselves from the other 2 parties by not taking corporate campaign donations. I think a party that takes a stand like that could make huge waves in the 2012 election.

[JohnLockesGhost]

The two-party system will be around until the plurality-take-all election system is altered to majority-take-all. The wasted vote phenomenon will persist until then.

[mjah]

Just wondering how an honest poker player will be able to sit down at a crooked table with two crooked players, and expect to win. Ever.

That assumes that the new player is mostly honest, of course, and not just more of the same. It also assumes that the third player's mandate is to do something more than simply show his cards to whichever crooked player promises to be more honest from this point forward.

Reading through the article, the first assumption is almost certainly false since the group is expressly working within the existing structure of party politics and trying to tap existing party-affiliated politicians. So arguably, maybe the new player can hang at a crooked table. But I think that second assumption is far more true than many people realize: you will support this group (hopefully) knowing that eventually it has to stoop almost to the level of one party or the other if it wants to have any real influence.

Always interesting to see third-party concepts (or in this case, mixed conglomerates of two existing parties) take early form. Not expecting much, though.

[Hubbs]

Been following this for a while now. Very curious to see who will be in the running for the nomination.

[Jumbo]

I can see an Al Gore/Donald Trump ticket.

[herrmag]

So, the repubs will attempt to show that the candidate is a liberal, and the dems will do the opposite in an attempt to cannibalize one party's votes. Curious if Americans will be intelligent enough to decipher this, or just throw up their hands and vote for their status quo party candidate.

[Hubbs]

I can see an Al Gore/Donald Trump ticket.

Come on, that's not even credible. You have to pick two people that voters can take more seriously, like Josiah Bartlet and Rush Limbaugh.

[Jumbo]

Come on, that's not even credible. You have to pick two people that voters can take more seriously, like Josiah Bartlet and Rush Limbaugh.

Josiah/Rush... almost has a Biblical-psycho quality to it...

[Larry]

The two-party system will be around until the plurality-take-all election system is altered to majority-take-all. The wasted vote phenomenon will persist until then.

Or proportional representation.

[JohnLockesGhost]

Or proportional representation.

Not sure how that would work for a singular office like the presidency, but several funny images come to mind.

[Larry]

Not sure how that would work for a singular office like the presidency, but several funny images come to mind.

It doesn't.

Just like the idea of a minority group deciding that they're going to try to win the Supr Bowl without winning any lesser offices, first, doesn't work, either.

(To continue to horribly stretch the football analogy, I could propose that this Party that wants to win the Presidency without first winning any lesser elections could call itself the Boise State Party.)

You want your moderate party to have a voice in our government? Get a few members elected to Congress.

How much influence do you think, say, 10 moderate members of Congress would have had, the lst two years?

----------

Or, I could point out that I was responding to a post which suggested that third parties don't have a chance because of our system if winner take all districts, by proposing that some electoral systems solve that problem by getting rid of districts.

[Hubbs]

Not sure how that would work for a singular office like the presidency, but several funny images come to mind.

It doesn't have to. We could have proportional representation in Congress, with one of a variety of voting systems for the White House:

- Our current one.

- A winner-take-all national popular vote.

- A two-stage vote, which could be done via the electoral college or in the same manner as a national popular vote, in which all of the candidates are on the ballot in the first round, and the two candidates that get the most votes advance to a head-to-head contest in the second round. Several other countries, France being one of the more notable ones, use this system, and I actually some of our own states do as well for certain offices.

- A "multiple selection" vote. (It may have a more common name, I just made that up.) Rather than voting for the candidate you support the most, you mark every candidate that you support at all on your ballot. This eliminates the "wasted vote" problem, as you would be able to vote for a candidate from a dominant party while also voting for a candidate from a minor party. (To put it in more concrete terms, if you supported both the Republican and Libertarian candidates, you would "put a check mark" next to both of them, so to speak, and both would be counted.) Every vote on every ballot counts the same. The candidate who receives the most overall votes wins.

- A "process of elimination" vote, similar to, say, the Iowa caucuses. Candidates must meet a certain level of support in order to move on to the next round. Let's say we set it at 5%. Everyone would vote, and candidates which received less than 5% of the votes would be eliminated, and their supporters would have to choose someone else. The next bar would be set at 10%, and so on. This system would be rather complicated, and doesn't seem particularly practical unless we developed some sort of hardened Internet voting system that would allow citizens to vote from home whenever they had the time on a certain day, while ensuring that each citizen could only vote once per round.

- A "none of the above" vote. Ballots would contain the option of voting for none of the available candidates, and if "none of the above" received the most votes, every party would have to come up with a new nominee for another vote that would happen in, say, another four months.

- A parliamentary system, with a prime minister essentially acting as the executive branch. I doubt this will ever happen here, and I don't think it should.

- Something else. There are some pretty creative, albeit obscure, proposals for electoral systems out there.

[Renegade7]

Get rid of the electoral college and lower the campaign fundraising limit to that which non-party candidates can compete. Not interested in another party, would rather see more citizens just run for office as themselves. I believe we're fed up with the current system enough to take someone serious if they were serious and knew their stuff...

[thebluefood]

I don't think this is a third political party. I think they're drawing from moderates from both political parties as well as unaffiliated moderates to nominate a third candidate.

[88Comrade2000]

I think you can modify the electoral college.

You could just go to a popular vote but then you better be prepared to become a socialist country like Europe with high taxes, high spending, etc...

The majority of people live in cities and cities are overwhelming Democratic.

I think the there's room for a third party but you would have to build it from the ground up and it would probably take 3-4 elections before they had the numbers to have a real impact.

For 2012 the best thing would be for an independent candidate; if you want a third party.

ACW would be happy, his guy Gary Johnson is thinking of running for the Libertarian Party. I think he would be crushed if Ron Paul chose to run for that.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1111/69110.html

[The Sisko]

I think you can modify the electoral college.

You could just go to a popular vote but then you better be prepared to become a socialist country like Europe with high taxes, high spending, etc...

The majority of people live in cities and cities are overwhelming Democratic.

So what you're saying is that "real America" isn't so "real" after all, i.e. that a minority of the country is wagging the dog.

I'm an independent and I have to say this sounds fishy to me. Given the folks behind it and the fact that there are already moderate independent groups out there and that they don't seem to support things that will change system, it looks like a GOP ploy to shave off enough voters to give whichever unelectable candidate they chose as their nominee a shot at winning. With that said I'll have to see more from them to determine what they're about.

Finally, a shameless plug for independent outing.org, a group that didn't just spring up yesterday and that does/has worked toward systemic change like open primaries and instant runoff voting.

[Thiebear]

Thats not a third paty: Thats the blue dogs and the teaparty.

The ones giving the establishment a hard time but staying inside the coloring book lines enough to get away with it.

[JohnLockesGhost]

It doesn't have to. We could have proportional representation in Congress, with one of a variety of voting systems for the White House:

- Our current one.

- A winner-take-all national popular vote.

- A two-stage vote, which could be done via the electoral college or in the same manner as a national popular vote, in which all of the candidates are on the ballot in the first round, and the two candidates that get the most votes advance to a head-to-head contest in the second round. Several other countries, France being one of the more notable ones, use this system, and I actually some of our own states do as well for certain offices.

- A "multiple selection" vote. (It may have a more common name, I just made that up.) Rather than voting for the candidate you support the most, you mark every candidate that you support at all on your ballot. This eliminates the "wasted vote" problem, as you would be able to vote for a candidate from a dominant party while also voting for a candidate from a minor party. (To put it in more concrete terms, if you supported both the Republican and Libertarian candidates, you would "put a check mark" next to both of them, so to speak, and both would be counted.) Every vote on every ballot counts the same. The candidate who receives the most overall votes wins.

- A "process of elimination" vote, similar to, say, the Iowa caucuses. Candidates must meet a certain level of support in order to move on to the next round. Let's say we set it at 5%. Everyone would vote, and candidates which received less than 5% of the votes would be eliminated, and their supporters would have to choose someone else. The next bar would be set at 10%, and so on. This system would be rather complicated, and doesn't seem particularly practical unless we developed some sort of hardened Internet voting system that would allow citizens to vote from home whenever they had the time on a certain day, while ensuring that each citizen could only vote once per round.

- A "none of the above" vote. Ballots would contain the option of voting for none of the available candidates, and if "none of the above" received the most votes, every party would have to come up with a new nominee for another vote that would happen in, say, another four months.

- A parliamentary system, with a prime minister essentially acting as the executive branch. I doubt this will ever happen here, and I don't think it should.

- Something else. There are some pretty creative, albeit obscure, proposals for electoral systems out there.

An important side effect of the run-off systems you mentioned is that they would also do away with the ridiculous spectacle that is the American Presidential Primary. Just put everyone from Barack Obama to Rick Santorum on the ballot and let people vote.

I don't really support the two-stage run-off as they have in France as it may allow two guys who combined received just 25% of the vote to enter the run-off. I believe this happened with Le Pen and Jacques Chirac only a few years ago. Le Pen was quite unpopular on the whole, but had a very loyal following. The field was fractured enough he made it to the run-off where he was soundly defeated.

I support the instantaneous run-off system that you hinted at. Only one election day, when people rank their choices. Computers make it pretty easy from there to eliminate that last place finisher until a single candidate has the majority of the vote.

I've always thought the Senate could be turned into a body of proportional representation and the HR could remain direct representatives of the people of their district. Heck it's already made up of the perfect number, 100. And the Senate now is just a glorified HR instead of what orginally was, a house of ambassadors sent to Washington from each state government. Just have the country vote on what party they would like represented in the Senate, and if 10% say Libertarian, boom, 10 Libertarian Senators. 40 Democrats, 40 Republicans and 10 more going to the Greens, Natural Law and Socialists. Maybe the Constitution Party would even get a Senator. We'd just have to make rules for rounding up and down.

[mjah]

I really do wonder why people advocate for eliminating the electoral college. I can see limited reform, but eliminating it? You'd reap an extraordinarily bitter harvest.

There's no perfect voting system. Some are better than others depending on the elected position and composition/segmentation of the voter base. Direct national popular vote is not automatically best for President, that's for sure.