The Green Party Is Good For Something

Have I mentioned I’ve stood for representative election? Locals get a certain number of votes based on their enrolled membership but they don’t have to muster their entire roster at election time and in other bodies like the Executive Committee get only a fixed number of votes regardless of whether the have 600 members or 20.

Pretty undemocratic, right?

Well I won in an unexpected landslide, frankly I think a membership poll would have been divided at best and I might very well have lost because lots of people hated me and many more after I was elected.

But I am a great believer in democracy and my last words to my Campaign Manager before my Floor Handler wisked me away to blitz visit delegations that declared in my favor were-

There will be no concession. I want every vote counted.

Because, of course, I’m a bloody minded fanatic with no interest in building bridges or “consensus”.

My unexpected victory did not mellow me nor have the years. I’d much rather be right than loved. This is why I have such great difficulty understanding Al Gore.

And Hillary.

Actually Hillary much more. Al at least mounted a tepid fight and he didn’t have the damn gall to leave his supporters hanging overnight while he made private phone calls to surrender.

What was up with that?

So I give the Greens credit for this-

It’s Starting: Green Party Launches Fundraising Drive for Presidential Recounts in WI, PA and MI
By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
November 23, 2016

The Green Party, led by its nominee Jill Stein, will file for presidential recounts in three states that gave Donald Trump his Electoral College majority—Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania—if they can raise the filing fees and legal costs, the party said Wednesday.

The first filing deadline would be Friday, where the Green Party would be expected to pay approximately $1 million to Wisconsin election officials and file legal documents saying what was suspect, to formally start the process in a state where Trump is ahead of Hillary Clinton by 27,000 votes. The party has set up a page on their website to crowdsource the funding, which may cost upwards of $2 million per state to execute.

“After a divisive and painful presidential race, reported hacks into voter and party databases and individual email accounts are causing many American to wonder if our election results are reliable,” Jill Stein said. “These concerns need to be investigated before the 2016 presidential election is certified. We deserve elections we can trust.”
…
(T)he Clinton campaign would need to be declared the winner in all three states to emerge with the presidency, which is far from certain. Second, the campaign’s participation would likely ignite a political firestorm at the same time that Clinton had been making statements accepting her loss. It appears that her senior staff either did not think the basis for a recount was strong enough or felt they could see what happens as the Greens initiate the effort. That is, they could get involved if the results are poised to change.

In contrast, the Greens have a record of pursuing election integrity issues for their one sake. In 2004, they, along with the Libertarian Party, led the recount effort in Ohio, despite the Democratic Party’s distancing themselves from that effort. In 2016, the voting rights attorneys and electronic voting machine experts behind the recount effort see patterns in the unofficial counts that raise questions about its accuracy. Their goal, they and Stein said, is not only to determine if Trump was the winner in these states, but also to understand where his actual supporters are and to highlight the often-unreliable machinery used to count votes.
…
The Greens and their election integrity team understand that any recounts will require the assembling of the necessary funds and infrastructure under an extremely tight timeframe. They know their efforts may not pan out, but feel they have no choice but to try to find ways to explain what happened on November 8, especially in states where what they see doesn’t seem right based on their years of tracking the machinery of elections.

It’s pretty damn hopeless actually, but the fact that the Greens are willing to fight and the Democratic Party isn’t really tells you all you need to know about Institutional Democrats.

Take over the Party or kick them on the ash heap of history.