Americans Elect Corporation Weakly Voting Highlights for 4/21/12

With just ten days left in the months-long ordeal that is Americans Elect Corporation's first-round ballot, the big picture remains as it has since Day 1: disinterested voters continue to fail to vote in sufficient numbers to advance any candidate to the second-round ballot. As the graph above illustrates, no candidate has achieved even half the number of qualifying votes required to stay on pace. But the fix is in, and that may be good news for these poor campaigners.

A rising tide lifts all boats, and this week witnessed increasing get-out-the-vote activity both on the part of Americans Elect itself (an AECorp Twitter blitzkrieg documented by Jim Cook of Irregular Times) as well as elevated levels of Twittertizing noted by us for candidates Buddy Roemer and Michealine Risley. The net effect was a micro-surge in voting this week, with 1,546 qualifying votes recorded for the top-twenty candidates we follow (up from a record-breaking low of just 829 two weeks ago), with all of the major candidates benefiting from this increased turnout. The graph immediately below better illustrates how this micro-surge translates into momentum for the top declared and presumptive candidates.

As this graph shows, Ron Paul (who is not a declared Americans Elect candidate but is, instead, a 'fantasy football' pretend candidate thrown into its lists by AECorp to spice up an otherwise dull lineup) was the major beneficiary of the surge, more than doubling his weekly vote harvest this week. Leading declared AECorp candidate Buddy Roemer enjoyed only a much smaller bump, but still enough to reverse what must have been a disappointing four-week streak of steadily decreasing weekly totals. 'Also-ran' declared candidates Rocky Anderson, Michealene Risley and Laurence Kotlikoff saw very tiny upticks in their weekly tallies, as did presumptive candidate David Walker.

The next figure puts these signs of momentum in perspective, and it is not a pretty picture:

This graph includes exactly the same data of the preceding graph, but with the vertical axis expanded to enable us to add, on the right, the vote accumulation rates each of the major candidates must achieve in these last remaining days of voting in order to advance to the next round. As you can see, each of the candidates would require unprecedented (and, obviously, wholly unrealistic) success over the next few days to survive this ballot. It should be noted here that so-called 'contingently qualified' candidates Anderson, Risley, and Kotlikoff require so many more votes than do so-called 'automatically qualified' candidates Walker, Roemer, and Paul because the former, according to AECorp's bizarre rules, must gain 50,000 qualifying votes to advance, whereas the latter must gain only 10,000. Contingently qualified candidates lack the qualifications typical of such past U.S. Presidential success stories as Richard Nixon, Herbert Hoover, and Millard Fillmore and are, therefore, "presumed to be unqualified" to serve as President, and so must win dramatically higher vote totals to survive this ballot. Go figure.

Candidate David "Who?" Walker's required additional votes would be right up there with Anderson's, Risley's, and Kotlikoff's impossibly huge numbers but for some AECorp insider funny-business we chronicled two weeks ago, in which AE stealthily moved Walker's goalposts by summarily declaring him a "Former Head of a Federal Agency" (which he is not), thus making him an 'automatically qualified' candidate. We have recently begun filing complaints of ballot fraud with states' Election Boards, citing this and other AECorp offenses. We'll begin reporting on the progress of these complaints in the near future.

Two weeks ago we speculated that the David Walker goalpost shift might signal an emerging plan from Americans Elect's penthouse to save itself, by bringing AECorp insider Walker on-board as a declared candidate and further arrange things to insure he wins the nomination (Walker is a wealth-friendly and safety-net-hostile agent operated by Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson). Very recent events continue to lend credence to this scenario. Last week AECorp National Campus Director, Nick Troiano, nominally resigned from Americans Elect to take the reins at The Committee To Get Walker Running, whose web site's domain name is owned by AE insider Solomon Kleinsmith.

If (as seems increasingly obvious) the fix is in for Walker at Americans Elect, this is actually marginally good news for the other 'major' candidates. In order to advance to the next round of balloting all they need do is simply stay ahead of Walker (a singularly lackluster vote-winner) in their qualifying vote tallies. When, at the end of the current round of balloting, AECorp's Board of Directors inevitably exercises its bylaw-granted "extraordinary power and authority to take or compel any action" by lowering the number of votes required to advance to the second round, we can be sure they will lower it to a number which will include favorite son Walker...and therefore will likewise include all candidates ahead of him in the tallies.

Good news indeed for Roemer, Anderson, Kotlikoff and Risley, who otherwise clearly wouldn't have the proverbial ice cube's chance in Hell.