Weakly Voting Highlights For Americans Elect (3/31/12)
Voter participation in the billionaire's beauty pageant we like to call 'Americans Elect Corporation' continued to disappoint founder and Chairman-For-Life Pete Ackerman this week, as Americans elected to ignore this Wall Street con in ever-increasing droves. This week's highlights:
The Faster They Run, The Behinder They Get: For the top-twenty contestants included in our graph, qualifying vote totals slumped to just 1,165 for the week, down from an already anemic 1,564 the previous week. With the voting period now 65% complete, no candidate (either declared or draft) has anything like 65% of the 10-state vote numbers required in order to advance to the next round of balloting. It now seems a near-certainty that Americans Elect will have NO candidates on its second-round ballot unless its board of directors does what AECorp has promised it would not do: move the goalposts at the last minute to avoid a humiliating and very public failure.
Paul Paranoia: Undeclared candidate and first-place contestant Ron Paul's draft campaign saw its vote-gathering dry up this week (just 153 new qualifying votes for Paul, compared with 533 last week) as a rumor swept the Paul supporters' twitterverse that Americans Elect is a conspiracy to disqualify Paulists from serving as delegates at the Republican convention (the theory being that if you're a 'delegate' for Americans Elect you cannot serve as a delegate in the Republican Party). This comes as a great blow to AECorp, as Paul supporters previously provided the vast majority of voting action there.
Roemer Can't Buy A Friggin Break: Leading declared candidate Buddy Roemer nosed out undeclared draft candidate Jon Huntsman this week to take second place in the pageant, but it was a Pyrrhic victory at best as Roemer fell even further off the pace required if he is to make it to the next round of voting (with the voting period 65% complete, Roemer has just 12.9% of the 10-state vote total he needs to advance to the second round). Roemer's harvest of new qualifying votes this week (totaling just 200) lapsed behind last week's 257, despite a very active Twitter and email campaign by his staff and followers to get out the vote. In a surprise move, Roemer this week tweeted an offer of 'swag' in exchange for votes (a story we were the first to break). In reply to our criticism that this constituted clearly unethical...and possibly illegal...vote-buying and electioneering, Roemer himself responded on his Facebook page "Give me a friggin break and get over it!" We look to see this AECorp insiders' favorite standing outside polling stations this November, offering voters free beer and sandwiches in exchange for their votes.
Anderson's Rocky Road: Ex-Salt Lake City mayor, 'Justice Party' candidate, and self-declared anti-corporatist Rocky Anderson stunned his supporters two weeks ago by throwing in with Americans Elect Corporation as a declared candidate. Still stunned, they aren't voting for him there. He received just 111 qualifying votes this week, down from 282 last week.
You misspelled weekly
ReplyDeleteWhat happens when nobody qualifies for the next round of voting? Does AE close up shop or does it tweek the numbers?
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteFor somebody like Pete Ackerman, failure is not an option (Titans of Industry love to say stuff like that, especially when they're failing). That leaves him with only two options which are, you know, options:
Delete1. Pull in a last-minute brand-name candidate who can attract some serious votes and thereby pull Pete's fat out of the fire. Word on the street has it that AECorp is heavily courting Pete's good buddy, Mike Bloomberg. The problems with this option are: (a) AECorp has nothing Bloomberg wants or can't already buy for himself (unlike the declared candidates it has suckered in so far); (b) it's unlikely that Bloomers can attract serious votes any better than the current crop of AECorp presidential wannabes; and (c) a Bloomberg candidacy does nothing to help AECorp's image problem as a Wall Street fat-cat plot.
2. Move the goal posts. Pete has "extraordinary power and authority" to do any damn thing he wants with Americans Elect Corporation. He can just change the rules, at the last minute, so that candidates no longer need 1K votes in each of 10 states but rather, say, 2755 votes total (by an odd coincidence, the number of votes Buddy Roemer has right now). Hey presto, problem solved. That's why we pay Pete the big bucks.