On April 12, Wisconsin state election officials determined that the Americans Elect petition has enough valid signatures. The state requires 10,000, and Americans Elect had submitted 17,000. Wisconsin now has four qualified parties. The others are Republican, Democratic, and Constitution.
Groups that are not qualified parties can still place nominees on the November ballot, with the party label, if they file independent candidate petitions. The independent petition for statewide nominees is 2,000 signatures.
And the beat goes on.
Americans Elect is performing an impressive and effificent ballot access operation nationwide.
I heard tonight that their efforts in Texas have obtained half the amount of petition signatures they believe will be sufficient to successfully meet the approximate 50,000 threshhold with an excess to comfortably negate invalid signatures or challenges.
Way to go, AmericanSelect! I always knew you’d amount to something! Please select our farmers wisely: ‘we the chattel’ are becoming agitated. Viable candidate or not, I’m writing in Ron Paul, just to piss off the latest “me too” Republican to demand that the Ron Paul revolution become his own. In the Gene Sharp wheel of activity, we can file this “voting for non-candidates” under “peaceful institutional procedures backed by threat and use of sanctions” AKA “peaceful noncompliance.”
The optimization for electoral emergence of the AE website looks like it needs a little work, but hey, you made due with what little a billion $ could buy, so I understand. It is a little too geared-toward-the-already-powerful for my tastes. You have to remember that the people of this nation have been flouridated and that their government school educations are woefully inadequate to allow for critical thinking. So, if you say Buddy Roemer, they’re likely to simply repeat “Four legs bad –Buddy Roemer Good!” Of course, Buddy, Skippy, Zippy, Mitt, Newt, and Tinky Holloway are all bad choices. All of them. They are all unphilosophical yes men. So is the economic cannibal we currently have in the (half)whitehouse.
The American Selectors simply don’t have the machinery necessary to select a good farmer. They’re too easily led astray by offers to fleece their neighbors, in order to provide them with extra wooly coats, and too unaware that that is simply a distraction before both them and their neighbors are slaughtered for mutton.
Like sheep, they need to be led –to the operating table, where they can be given functional brain transplants, or perhaps a nice big pill of NZT.
Yeah, I’m on it too. I have to go answer the door, the DEA wants to know where I got it. I hope you decide that someone with integrity is a “viable” candidate. That will be a touch better than letting the Ds and Rs decide who’s “viable.” Which, of course, they’ve already done, since you’re only allowing existing political parasites to be considered for the office.
I might have to change my write-in vote from Ron Paul to “Gene Sharp” —just to send a message.
Then again, the best candidate would be Julian Heicklen and only the educated .00001% even know who he is, so he won’t be winning elections any time soon.
Hopefully I haven’t been too much of a wet blanket: I’d hate for you to choose a farmer like Hitler for us all. A lot of U.S. human farm chattel might well perish under such a cruel and gouging set of shears.
Anyway, have a nice day. 🙂 -Watchmen
“I heard tonight that their efforts in Texas have obtained half the amount of petition signatures they believe will be sufficient to successfully meet the approximate 50,000 threshhold with an excess to comfortably negate invalid signatures or challenges.”
I didn’t think that they had that many petitioners working down there, or that the petition drive had been going on down there long enough to have that many signatures. I’m not saying that this is necessarily untrue, maybe it is or maybe it’s not, either way, I’m suprised to hear this.
I’m glad I decided to publicly support Buddy Roemer and Americans Elect after all. I had my concerns at first and vented them freely but the people ranting against even the possibility of a viable outside challenge to the failed existing power structure now just sound deranged. This will happen and it will be truly historic. They’d better just get used to the idea. I’d prefer not to be on the wrong side of history.
#3 I belive the AE petitioners started just a couple days after they possibly could in early March. I don’t have any information on #s of petitioners.
While I think that Texas has some more of the greater ballot access hurdles in our country I am now inclined to think that Texas is somewhat of a slam dunk compared to other states based on AE’s methodical efforts to date.
This year, Texas ballot access for newly-qualifying parties is easier than it has been since 1967. People who sign a minor party petition aren’t suppose to later vote in the primary, but if they do, the signature is still valid. Also this year the petitioning period is longer than it has been, ever since 1967 when the petition process was first created. Before 1967 Texas did not require any petition for a party to be on the ballot; it just had to hold a state convention and county conventions in at least 20 counties.
#3 Texas gives new parties 75 days after their precinct conventions (March 13) to collect supplemental signatures. They appear to have expected that date all along, though there was some uncertainty because of the delay in the primary.
The night of the precinct conventions is set to be a week after the primary – actually it was supposed to be the night of the primary, but the legislature forgot to change it when they moved the primary to a week earlier. But the date is set in the Election Code, without respect to the primary date. So while the primary date was moved by the court order, the convention date/petition date was not moved.
So 50%, 30 days into a 75-day collection period seems like a pace you’d want. The end of the period would be after colleges let out for the summer – and presumably colleges are good places to find a lot of pedestrian traffic, and willing signers. The Justice Party is also collecting signatures, and you can only sign one petition. While I don’t think they are using professional circulators, college campuses would be a good target for them as well.
As it turns out, the court order did add a month to the petition period – probably by accident or indifference, rather than any sort of intentional design. But this wouldn’t have been known until a couple of weeks before collection began, and I doubt that AEP would drastically change their planning. They might change a little bit on when people need to get their signed petitions to Austin.
And roughly the last 45 days of the petitioning period are after the start of early voting in the primary, and voting in a primary disqualifies a voter from signing the petition. So you could start getting into more voters who are disqualified.
#6 The petition forms sate “I know that the purpose of this petition is to entitle the American Elects Party to have its nominees placed on the ballot in the general election for state and county officers. I have not voted in a primary election or participated in a convention of another party during this voting year, and I understand that I become ineligible to do so by signing this petition. I understand that signing more than one petition to entitle a party to have its nominees placed on the general election ballot in the same election is prohibited.”
Circulators are required to point to that statement and read it aloud, and when the circulators sign the petition, they certify that they did so.
Most signers probably understand the part about not voting in the primary. They may not actually understand the part about voting in a primary that is two months away – and 37% (made up figure) would read that as saying that they would be ineligible to sign the petition if they had voted in a primary. And I doubt that there is a legal obligation on the part of the circulator to say, “you look puzzled, you know if you sign this petition that you won’t be able to vote in the Republican presidential primary at the end of May, so consider carefully before executing this potentially disenfranchising event”.
But voters may withdraw their signature from a petition. So someone could show up at the polling place for the primary and be asked if they had voted in the Democratic primary, or participated in a Green or Libertarian convention, or signed the Americans Elect petition. This is a reasonable request, since the parties don’t want ineligible voters voting in their primary because it makes recounts messy.
If the voter says that they signed the AEP petition, they could tell the voter that they can withdraw their signature, and vote in the primary. Withdrawal requires notifying both the SOS and the state chair of the AEP, so the helpful party official could give them assistance.
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