Last time we checked in with Americans Elect, we looked at a rule change that allowed 5 people to fund the whole organization, campaign, party, process, whatever.
Here’s John Lumea with the rule change:
The Americans Elect Board unanimously voted to ensure that no supporter would cover more than 20% of AE’s budget. In the event that any one supporter exceeds that percentage, there are provisions created to expedite repayments to that supporter.
What this Board decision basically says is that as few as five people can fund the whole damned thing.
Jim Cook is an Americans Elect delegate, and he objects to the new rule, so he tried to do that. Object.
Here’s an e-mail Americans Elect Policy Director Brian Findlay sent me late last night after I followed AE rules and formally moved to reverse its decision to allow as few as 5 people to fully fund Americans Elect:
Dear Mr. Cook,
Thank you for initiating a request for Delegate reversal of a Board decision pursuant to Americans Elect Pre-election Convention Rule 12.2. Your request for reversal of the Board’s decision submitted on Friday, 2 March 2012 regarding the proportion of supporter funding is timely and in order for consideration. Accordingly, the Website has posted your statement along with instructions that any Delegate who wishes to initiate a reversal vote should support your statement. You will have 48 hours to obtain the required support from Delegates upon the posting. [The 48-hour window started at 9pm EST today, after I verified that the Board decision was posted in its entirety and your statement of petition was available for Delegates to view.] If enough Delegates support your request, we will proceed with a reversal vote as required by the Rules.
Sincerely,
Brian Findlay
Policy Director
Americans ElectTwo features jump out.
First, the Americans Elect website has indeed posted my statement along with instructions for delegates. But that’s all it’s done. It hasn’t sent out any messages to delegates letting them know about the motion, even though it has their e-mail addresses. And even though Americans Elect has a “News” section of its website, it hasn’t posted the news about a motion to be voted on there either. Americans Elect hasn’t sent a message to its delegates in any way.
Because Americans Elect hasn’t sent out any message to delegates, the delegates will have to somehow stumble across the motion. In order to find the motion, discover that it exists, and then take action, ten thousand delegates will all need to:
1) for some reason or other, decide all on their own that they want to visit the Americans Elect website within the next 48 hours;
2) further decide that they’d like to click on the “About” tab, even though if they’ve signed up and been verified as delegates they’ve kind of already passed the “About” stage;
3) beyond that, further decide that they’d like to click on the new “Board Decisions” tab for some reason;
4) then scroll down to the second decision, where they’ll read the needed text.
How likely is that, not just for one but for ten thousand delegates, all within the next 48 hours? Not likely at all. If Americans Elect is sincerely interested in giving delegates a chance to weigh in on the motion, it will have to affirmatively let delegates know that the motion exists. But Americans Elect hasn’t done that.
This is where we get to the second point. Instead of letting delegates know there’s a motion under consideration for them to vote on, it’s sent me an e-mail after starting the 48-hour period telling me that it’s my responsibility “to obtain the required support from Delegates.”
OK, I can handle responsibility. I’ve had a cat and a dog before. So let me get started here… by… um…
… contacting the delegates and obtaining their support. Wait a second. How do I do that?
There’s no way to contact a fellow delegate. None. Not even if they’ve made their profile public. Oh, there’s a very interesting looking graphic called “Caucus” on the upper-right, but it’s a grayed-out link. It doesn’t work. I’ve filed a motion already (which I had to do when I did because Americans Elect requires objection motions to be filed within 72 hours of any notice of an Americans Elect decision) and I need to be able to contact delegates today. Now.
It can’t be done.
Americans Elect has a nominally democratic process. I can, nominally, file a motion. Nominally, delegates can click a button on a website stuck away in the third level of a menu system to vote for my motion. But practically speaking, Americans Elect has hidden away the elements that are needed for people to assert their full, actual democratic role in this process.
P.S. I’m not even sure Americans Elect has 10,000 voter-registration-verified delegates. So I’ve written back to Brian Findlay to ask him for the information I need to play my part in this “democratic” process.
Everyone hates political party rules, I know that, this always comes up in primaries (we hate caucuses) and the two major political parties have sometimes bizarre and undemocratic and always complicated rules. For one small example, the rules that govern the delegate selection process for the Democratic National Convention in 2012 run twenty pages, and that’s just national, not including what I’ll call “sub-rules” for the 50 state parties, but any of the rules can be followed, conceivably. It’s not impossible to follow them, or figure them out. Americans Elect seems to have chosen a deliberately opaque process that may be impossible to use.
Yutsano
Makes one think, doth it not? Mayhaps Bloomberg’s ego trip wants to stay Bloomberg’s ego trip and not get infected by rabble who might express an opinion counter to Bloomberg’s ego. Can’t have that!
Ash Can
I’m shocked — shocked! — to find opaqueness in this establishment.
PeakVT
Nobody could have predicted that democracy would be just a marketing ploy for an organization created by a bunch of billionaires.
SuperHrefna
Never forget: Americans Elect is brought to us by the people who gave us the credit default swap…
Mike Goetz
It’s all designed to create the same bureaucratic indifference that has worked so well for the corporate stooges that run Americans Elect.
Jado
WHOA whoa whoa…
Americans Elect is somehow subverting their supposed members in favor of control by a small coterie of wealthy patrons?
NO WAY!!!
Hoocouldanode…
kay
@PeakVT:
I’m hooked on the name, because it’s so carefully chosen. “Americans Elect”
Doesn’t it just sound perfect, as a brand?
urizon
Americans elect have chosen to keep the money.
Jay in Oregon
@kay:
Democracy by focus group?
And I agree with everyone else; this “opaqueness” is by design.
I’ve believed from the get-go that the whole plan is to “gather feedback” from their “delegates” and supporters and then announce their hand-picked candidate as “the peoples’ choice.”
elisathon
Sorry, de-lurking to post comment to try to get out of Mobile Site mode {{Grrr}}
Great post Kay, thank you.
PeakVT
@kay: It does sound perfect, until you remember Calvinism and predestination. Then it’s pretty damn funny.
El Cid
What this country has really been lacking is a political party which more explicitly and openly represents the sorts of processes by which the intersecting groups of the super-wealthy and the social upper classes and the ‘power elites’ of individuals in prestigious positions run the country.
feebog
I don’t know Jim Cook, but the fact he seems surprised by all of this says a lot. Jump in bed with a bunch of entitled millionaires and then be surprised when they run their organization like a business, rather than a democracy. Idiot.
Linda Featheringill
@Ash Can:
And those naifs actually thought they were going to participate in the political process. Sad.
liberal
Someone somewhere pointed out that Lessig is tied in with AE. Really disappointing.
Suffern ACE
@El Cid: Yep. They’ve done a heck of a job collecting their golden parachutes when they haven’t even been fired. Now they want to make sure they can never be fired.
daveNYC
Sounds about right.
kay
@feebog:
I may have misrepresented him by editing it. I don’t think he is surprised, reading the whole post.
The reason the Americans Elect stuff is fun to follow is that they’re actually participating in it, but I don’t know that those who are writing about the process are earnestly sincere all the time.
Unsympathetic
These are the same foofs who tried to use town hall meetings to prove “support” for Social Security reforms disguised as the catfood commission via the Concord Coalition.
What’s next – demanding the Keystone XL pipeline be an amendment on a highway bill?
Democratic Nihilist, Keeper Of Party Purity
Wow, a “party” founded by a mustachioed billionaire strip mall owner is not responsive to the desires of its members? Color me unsurprised.
John
This, from Alex Pareene of Salon, is pretty great too:
dollared
I think we’re violating a basic rule in this discussion: Never attribute to evil that which can be explained by really bad user interface design.
(of course, I’m partial to the Arthur Dent explanation….)
dollared
Oh, and one other thing:
kay
@dollared:
What I love about it is, it requires no real work or effort. That just seems naive to me. Say what you will about a traditional caucus or primary, one has to put on their shoes to participate, which assumes a certain commitment.
“We’ll remake US democracy, but we will never leave this chair“.
I don’t know about that.
John
I’d note that I’m also rather astonished to discover that Lawrence Lessig is an Americans Elect/Buddy Roemer supporter. I didn’t realize that anyone other than Buddy Roemer’s immediate family was a Buddy Roemer supporter.
mdblanche
@dollared: That is the question. Is Americans Elect being lawful neutral or lawful evil? (Keeping in mind that where those two overlap is where you usually find bureaucracy like this…)
James E. Powell
Whenever I read about third party efforts by rich people, I think about Ross Perot and all those deluded people who thought he was the new new thing in politics.
Truth? I loved the charts. But the whole idea? Not so much. Where are the people who voted for Jesse Ventura? Or Arnold Schwarzenegger? What do they think now about those decisions?
dollared
@John: Lessig is not either. He wants to take over Americans Elect and use it for his purposes. Incredibly naive….
dollared
@kay: Of course. What does Tide promise you? Cleaner clothes and no additional work.
gocart mozart
“But the plans were on display . . .”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a torch.”
“Ah, well the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.”
gocart mozart
@daveNYC:
Did not read comments before posting. Consider me duly “AHEMED!”
Calouste
I stand by my earlier suggestion that Americans Elect is not as much a vanity project by a couple of secret billionaires as much as it is an employment project by a few political consultants sold as a vanity project to a couple of secret billionaires.
RalfW
My thanks to Jim Cook for this detailed view into – surprise! – how much of a sham AmericanSelect is.
The SelectFive(c) no doubt value your adorably cute motion. So they posted it. In the abandoned graveyard known as the AmercanSelect web site.
HaHaHaahahaaa.
Chris
@daveNYC: Dammit, you beat me to posting that. :-)
central texas
Jim’s fundamental problem is that he does not understand that AE does not give a shit for or about his opinion. They are, at best, a vanity project by a collection of those unwilling to participate in our democracy and, more likely, simply the wealth-lubricated musings of various hedge-fund types who would like to have a president who not only showers them with money and protects them from justice but also does not hurt their widdle feelings.
Born to Question
Everything about this AE is antithetical to the values espoused by Buddy Roemer and Prof. Lessig. Why are they associating themselves with this undemocratic, big money controlled, secretly funded, phony organization? I know that Roemer does not believe in the high moral ideals he so beautifully advocates. He’ll say anything if it will give him the adoration and attention of the voters. Maybe the comment above about Lessig is correct….naive.
I do not think AE will choose Roemer. He has shown that he is not resonating with the voters. Will Roemer decide before he is rejected to jump off this ship of fraud or will he wait until they reject him and then claim he decided it did not meet his high standards? I’ll bet the latter.
Born to Question
@John:
From what I hear, you are wrong. Buddy Roemer’s family does not support him in this. He is the only candidate who does not have his wife and children at his side as he is campaigning.
They know him. Familiarity breeds contempt.