[statecom] letter from the co-chairs 9 March 2008

[Nat Fortune]

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9 March 2008



To: The Green-Rainbow Party

From: Nat Fortune, Merelice, Co-chairs



  Over the past few months the committees and officers of our party  
have spent a large fraction of their time dealing with various  
proposals and schemes whose consistent theme has been to keep one  
candidate (Ralph Nader) off the presidential primary election ballot  
or to disenfranchise Nader voters by denying them representation at  
the national presidential convention, despite clear statements in  
both state law and our own delegate selection plan that only the  
candidate can release delegates earned by that candidate in the  
presidential primary.



The latest proposals of this sort consist of (1) a "Minority Opinion"  
and (2) the filing of a formal legal complaint with the Secretary of  
the Commonwealth by Kat Swift, one of the presidential primary  
candidates, using the arguments made in the Minority Opinion as a  
basis for the complaint and demanding that the Secretary of the  
Commonwealth intervene in our Party's delegate selection process.



What saddens us about the Minority Opinion is that it is being signed  
by several well-meaning people who think they are seeking a  
principled response but have been misled by a prejudicial  
misrepresentation of the facts without benefit of an accurate  
context. Misunderstandings may be arising because the majority of the  
signatories were neither at the state convention (when the decision  
to open our presidential primary ballot to independents as well as  
Green party members passed by a vote of 75% in favor to 25% opposed)  
nor involved since then in the issues under discussion at the State  
Committee meetings that followed .



This statement is intended to describe the situation as understood by  
the co-chairs. We believe that the information provided here is fully  
consistent with the decisions and views expressed at the State  
Convention, the State Committee, and the CDLC (Candidate Development  
and Legal Committee).



  (1) The strict and exclusionary ballot-list criteria which form the  
basis of the complaints in the Minority Opinion are the creation of  
the complainants and do not represent official procedures of the  
Green-Rainbow Party. The criteria cited for ballot-list inclusion  
appear in no officially approved minutes of the Party.



  (2) The co-chairs and Elie Yarden —who served (with the approval of  
AdCom) in lieu of CDLC at the request of former CDLC chairs Mike  
Heichmann and Jamie O’Keefe— expended many hours in attempting to  
faithfully execute the ballot-list process of the Party. We neither  
excluded from the ballot list any candidate whose campaign responded  
to our inquiries regarding placement on the ballot nor included any  
candidate whose campaign failed to indicate (a) that the candidate  
was willing to be placed on the ballot, (b) that the candidate knew  
she or he was being placed on the ballot, (c) that the candidate was  
aware of the Commonwealth’s 24-hour (usually one-week) deadline for  
withdrawing from the ballot, and (d) that the candidate knew that  
being on the GRP ballot meant their names would be placed in  
nomination for president on the Green Party ticket.



  (3) We disagree with the Minority Opinion’s assertion that the  
Secretary of the Commonwealth's Elections Division should have acted  
to keep Ralph Nader off the ballot because he had not yet formally  
declared his campaign for president (as opposed to draft or  
exploratory campaign status). State law explicitly instructs the  
Secretary of the Commonwealth to cause to be placed on the ballot  
both candidates and potential candidates. We also note that by this  
criterion, the opinion authors should also be objecting to the  
placement of Elaine Brown and Cynthia McKinney on the ballot list,  
since neither had officially declared by the December 5th deadline  
for placing candidates on the ballot list, in accordance with the  
schedule established by the Secretary of the Commonwealth. In all  
three cases, however, such objections would be and are without merit  
and would run counter to the Green-Rainbow Party's longstanding  
support for more open ballot access.



  (4) The Minority Opinion also asserts that _written_ statements of  
intent were required prior to placement on the ballot list --- on the  
basis that there is no “separability clause” and that we should  
therefore ignore the word ‘only’ in the phrase “The only requirements  
for a candidate to be placed on the presidential primary ballot are."  
This interpretation would have required us to wrongly exclude all  
candidates on our ballot list except two: Kat Swift and Kent Mesplay.  
The Minority Opinion authors single out only one of the six  
candidates on the ballot list, thus violating the principle of  
treating all candidates as fairly as possible.



  (5) We do not believe candidates were improperly excluded from the  
ballot list. The one candidate cited in this regard, Jesse Johnson,  
did not appear on our ballot list due to our inability to obtain a  
response from the candidate or his campaign before the deadline for  
submission of our list to the Secretary of the Commonwealth. We note  
that at the time we submitted our list, his name still was not listed  
on the website of the Green Party USA as a candidate; nevertheless,  
we did attempt to contact and include him. We regret that the  
imperfections of the communication process did not allow us to  
clarify his status prior to the submission deadline. We reject the  
implications that this failure was in any way intentional or that it  
represents lack of due diligence on the part of the volunteers  
involved in ballot-list formation.



  (6) We note with some relief that the Minority Opinion authors did  
not insist on excluding all candidates who failed to provide the  
requested acknowledgment of their desire to be placed on the ballot  
list two weeks prior to the filing deadline, since none of the six  
had been heard from by that time. Still, if all of the instructions  
to CDLC were to be read as requirements for ballot access, then we  
should not have placed anyone on the ballot list.



  (7) More important than any of this, however, is that regardless of  
how a candidate's name got onto the ballot (by placement by the co-  
chairs, by signatures on a petition, by inclusion by the Secretary of  
the Commonwealth, or by write-in on the ballot), every vote they  
received is valid and must be honored. Any candidate who received at  
least 1/32 of the vote (because there are 32 delegates total) must  
receive delegates. Arguments about ballot formation do not relieve us  
of this obligation.



  (8) By state law and our own delegate selection plan --- approved  
by State Committee by consensus in a special online session ending 28  
September 2007, with 18 of the seated 24 members voting, and  
submitted to the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s office on October  
1st --- the only person who can release a candidate’s delegates is  
the candidate herself/himself. We are not, for example, allowed to  
not allocate delegates by redefining candidate to mean something  
other than those who appeared on our ballot (including no preference  
and those who are written in and are not members of other parties),  
nor are we permitted to hold a second private election of those who  
voted previously. In fact, such a process would disenfranchise the  
unenrolled voters who voted in our primary. The remedies suggested in  
the Minority Opinion would violate state laws rightly designed to  
protect the integrity of the electoral process from corruption by  
party insiders. We feel that the great majority of our party members  
will oppose the violations of democratic principles that are inherent  
in the Minority Opinion.



  (9) Our primary election plan promised candidates that 32 delegates  
would be awarded according to the vote on February 5. Candidates, and  
their supporting campaign volunteers, expended time and money in  
competing for these delegates. It would be a breach of faith, not to  
mention illegal, to change the rules and award delegates according to  
rules created post-facto by party committees.



  (10) We feel that all the remedies suggested so far by the  
complainants are grossly out of keeping with our party's commitment  
to democracy and lifting every voice. Discarding the votes of 39% of  
our supporters who cast votes in our primary for Ralph Nader not only  
would expose us to legal challenge, but also would represent a major  
insult to our long- accepted principle that grassroots democracy  
(i.e. the individual voter) should not be subverted by party  
insiders. The proper mechanism for releasing delegates of candidates  
who have since decided not to pursue the Green Party nomination for  
president is to appeal directly to the candidates who earned those  
delegates in the primary. They, and they alone, are the ones in whom  
the ability to release their delegates resides.



  In conclusion, we recommend that the Party stand by its approved  
delegate selection plan, reject attempts to circumvent election laws,  
resist attempts to attack particular candidates through manipulation  
of Party committees, and deplore the instigation of legal attacks  
upon the Party, its committees, and its officers.



  Signed,



  Nat Fortune, M.K. Merelice



  Co-Chairs, Green-Rainbow Party