Saturday, April 21, 2012

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.



6 comments:

  1. Regarding the comments in your last two paragraphs, I wouldn't be surprised if AE decided to lower the supporter requirements so that Walker would qualify. But Walker is currently running behind six declared candidates (as well as 14 draft candidates).

    Only the top 6 candidates are supposed to advance from the AE primary round to the nominations round -- although as each draft candidate declines the draft, the next-ranked candidate will be invited to replace the former draftee. So if there are six declared candidates plus Walker in the primary, he's going to have to finish ahead of at least one of the other declared candidates in order to advance.

    And there's always the possibility that a draft candidate like Stephen Colbert could choose to accept the draft in order to give himself a few weeks of material for his television show, thus making it less likely that Walker will advance.

    I don't know how much manipulation it could take to make Walker the AE nominee, except that it would probably be a lot.

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    1. Thanks for the comments, Joshua, which are always thoughtful. But with reference to the first graph above, we count only four declared candidates which Walker is running behind: Roemer, Anderson, Kotlikoff, and Risley (at least in terms of qualifying votes; we ignore total votes because, under the current AECorp rules, they mean nothing). Are you using total vote counts to determine that he's running behind six declared candidates instead of just four?

      Anyway, we're confident that with the combined billions of The Petes (Peterson and Ackerman) behind him, plus the AECorp Board's omnipotent power to do any damn thing it wants, they'll find a way to get candidate Walker right where they want him.

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    2. One of us will be wrong, AE Transparency, so let's make it a bet:

      I bet that the David Walker spinoff of Americans Elect will NOT make the Americans Elect ballot, just as the Draft Bloomberg Committee spinoff of Unity08 did not take off. In both cases, the American people just aren't excited about the candidates that the Wall Street-DC organizations prop up.

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    3. Jim, we can't shake the feeling that betting against your keen, well-honed, and proven powers of observation is a bad idea, but if only to make this fun we'll take the bet.

      There are a couple of differences between today's situation and 2008's which we're counting on:

      1. Pete Ackerman learned a lot from the Unity08 debacle; he's not the kind of guy who makes the same mistakes twice.

      2. One thing he learned in '08 was that it was a mistake to allow the American people to determine the outcome of his plans. With Americans Elect he has created an organization which is independent of the American people's wishes; he has wired in an "I win" button. All he has to do is press it (and we bet he will).

      3. Bloomberg might have been a little tempted in '08, or at least flattered, by Ackerman's plans for him, but at the end of the day he had better things to do and, as a billionaire himself, he really didn't need to shill for another billionaire. Walker's a different story. He has nothing better to do (indeed he's been grooming for this moment for years), and he is well-practiced at shilling for billionaires.

      Any way, we propose a six-pack of the loser's favorite local microbrew. And by 'loser' we mean the loser of this bet, not Walker.

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  2. TJ O'Hara and Mike Ballantine were the two other declared candidates I was thinking of. O'Hara has 191 supporters from his top 10 states, and Ballantine has 153, compared to 134 for Walker;

    However, I wasn't taking into account the fact that Walker is now classified as an insider, whereas O'Hara and Ballantine are outsiders, and thus they need five times as many votes to qualify as Walker does. So you are correct that he is, relatively speaking, ahead of them according to the current rules. On the other hand, the current rules are likely to be discarded in the near future anyway.

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  3. We need a choice in stark contrast to the professional public figure politicians. Some working class everyday American who holds himself accountable to "We the People."

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