John Lumea

Lessig Responds to Open Letter About the Americans Elect Neutrality Policy

"Having No Power, I Have No Duty to
Waive Any Freedom I Might Have"

On Sunday evening, I sent Americans Elect advisory
board member Lawrence Lessig a letter asking him to explain his repeated public advocacy for Americans Elect candidate Buddy Roemer.

I and others have found these activities hard to square with Americans Elect's official policy of neutrality, which is codified in Section 10.0 of the corporation's Rules (pdf link — emphasis mine):

Until the Americans Elect ticket has been selected by majority vote of participating Delegates in the Nominating Round of voting, Americans Elect shall be neutral with respect to all Candidates and shall not endorse, oppose, advance, or advocate any particular Candidate.

I posted my challenge as an open letter, and advised Lessig of the same.

Yesterday, Lessig responded as follows (emphasis mine). Elliot Ackerman, referenced in Lessig's note, is the son of Americans Elect founder and lead investor Peter Ackerman, and also is the COO of Americans Elect.

John,

Thank you for your letter, and especially for
the decency in the manner in which you have framed your criticism.

When I was asked to join the Advisory board,
I explicitly asked about whether that would preclude me from advocating on behalf of anyone, including candidates for an AE position. I was told it did not. That position
was confirmed to me by Elliot Ackerman in
this email:

My understanding of an "Advisory Board" is precisely the same: Members are asked to
give their advice, but not their loyalty. As a Member, I am free to criticize AE if I believe they are behaving badly. As a Board Member,
I would not have that freedom (to the extent it was inconsistent with a duty of loyalty). Giving up that freedom would be fair (again, were I a member of the Board) because Membership
on the board would give me power in the organization. But having no power, I have no duty to waive any freedom I might have.

Let me know if that has clarified things. I don't think this distinction is "Clintonian": By that, you mean that the actions have the same effect. But my actions don't have the same effect. I have no power in AE. I have no rights in AE. I therefore have no duty to waive any liberty I otherwise have as a citizen.

::   ::   ::

Actually, by "Clintonian," I mean the tendency
to rationalize a given behavior by appealing to a hair-splitting interpretation of the "law" — in this
case, the Americans Elect neutrality policy (which most broadly is embodied in Rule 10, above) — that skews heavily to the letter of the law rather than to its spirit.

Perception is reality. And what has been clear to me, from the beginning, is that the official and actual public neutrality of Americans Elect — including
the public perception that Americans Elect is neutral — is key to the integrity of the whole Americans Elect project. That citizens simply are not going to trust and take seriously an organization that pays lip service to "opening up the political process" and putting full voting power in the hands of the people, and that claims to be interested solely in creating the structural "empty vessels" of an additional 50-state
ballot line and a Web-based nominating platform — but that also seems to be designing these vessels to carry only a certain kind of political cargo.

So the ideological "stacking of the deck" guaranteed by Americans Elect's "unity ticket" mandate — in which the corporation favors a "centrist" Republican-Democrat ticket — always has struck me as wrongheaded. (Lessig
and I agree, on this point.)

But the double standard of applying the neutrality mandate embodied in Rule 10 only to the relative handful of "directors"and "officers" (see Sections 4.12 and 6.1 of the Bylaws; pdf link), but not to the 100-plus members of the Board of Advisors — individuals who frequently have been the public faces of Americans Elect in the media, and whose names and institutional affiliations Americans Elect displays prominently on its Web site, in an effort to enhance its public credibility — this, too, is an impartiality disconnect.

The truth is: Even in the case of Americans Elect's directors and officers, the neutrality policy is only wink-wink (see Christie Whitman). But the idea should be to go "above and beyond," in assuring the public that Americans Elect is neutral and that delegates hold all the power — not to design and implement elaborate layers of political bet hedging such as a "neutrality" policy that, in practice, hasn't been made to apply to anybody on the masthead.

That the COO and son of the founder of Americans
Elect disagrees — "nothing about your membership
as a member of our Advisory Board prohibits you from supporting any candidate you wish" — is telling.

Telling, too, that this "neutrality gap" with respect
to the Board of Advisors is nothing that the "free to criticize Americans Elect" Lessig — or, apparently, any other Americans Elect advisory board member — has deemed "behaving badly," to borrow Lessig's phrase.

Telling that Buddy Roemer, too, thinks that Lessig's non-neutrality is A(E)-OK.

And telling that nowhere in Americans Elect Rules or Bylaws is the behavior of the advisors or the Board of Advisors of Americans Elect constrained in any way.

They aren't even mentioned.

::   ::   ::

A major reason why Americans Elect now has had
to cancel all three of its scheduled primary ballots,
for lack of sufficient public support for any Americans Elect candidate in particular, and for the Americans
Elect process in general, is this: Americans Elect is not seen as a neutral broker. Citizens are not motivated to participate, when they don't believe and have confidence that their voices and their votes have full weight but, rather, believe that they have been "pre-subjugated" to the will of insiders with money, power and media access.

Americans Elect is not immune to this fundamental law
of political psychology.

Had Americans Elect instead created an unambiguous and airtight "public neutrality" plank that applied with equal force to Americans Elect directors, staffers and advisors — and had Americans Elect implemented a zero-tolerance policy on violations of this plank — Americans Elect would not be where it finds itself today. Of this I am sure. Indeed...

If Americans Elect hopes to recover any
possibility of a sustainable future for itself —
or, perhaps, any future at all — it will have to abandon its "centrist" ideological pretensions
and get serious about neutrality, along the lines
I suggest here.

Lessig sees it differently. He says that his "duty"
to Americans Elect — including his duty to abide by Americans Elect's neutrality policy (which he frames as his duty to "waive any liberty I otherwise have as a citizen") — is limited by his "power in the organization."

Lessig has "no power," he says, and "no rights" —
by which he means that, since he's not a member
of the Board of Directors of Americans Elect, he has
no voting rights and power — thus he has "no duty."

It's not quite that simple.

The truth is, Lessig and other members of the Board
of Advisors have considerable soft power.

In pubicly listing Lessig and other advisors, Americans Elect is saying — indeed, promoting — to the general public, to prospective delegates and to the media that these advisors are "on the team" at Americans Elect.

This being the case, it's reasonable to assume that all three audiences — general public, prospective delegates and media — are looking to the statements and actions
of Lessig and other members of the Board of Advisors of Americans Elect, to help them determine:

• Who is Americans Elect?

• How deeply — if at all — should I
  become involved?

So, when Lawrence Lessig or Mark McKinnon, for example — people who, in addition to their status as Americans Elect advisory board members, also are public figures with public reputations and outsized national media access, giving them the potential to have enormous influence and, yes, power in shaping public and delegate and media opinion about the sort of thing that Americans Elect is...

When Americans Elect advisors like Lessig or McKinnon take to MSNBC or to The Atlantic or even to Twitter (Lessig has 190,037 followers) and give the nod to Buddy Roemer — or to David Walker — or to Jon Huntsman — or to any other specific candidate or type of candidate,
it can't help but telegraph and reinforce to delegates
and to potential delegates the suggestion that certain decisions about the nominee pool already have been made.

And, for those delegates and potential delegates who don't happen to share the politics being promoted, the candidate or ideological advocacy being engaged in by these Americans Elect advisors can't help but have a chilling effect on the desire of these citizens to participate in the Americans Elect process. In effect, it robs them of their power.

And that matters. It matters very much.

An Open Letter to Lawrence Lessig About the Americans Elect Neutrality Policy

With Reference to Lessig's Status as a Member of the Board of Advisors of Americans Elect and His Activism on Behalf of the Americans Elect Candidacy of Buddy Roemer

Lawrence,

Over the last few months, I've done a good bit of writing about Americans Elect.

Rick Hasen called my essay "The Shadow Super PAC of 'Centrism'" a "must-read...on the continued internal democracy deficit at Americans Elect, and the serial violation of a neutrality pledge by Americans Elect’s leadership."

I have enormous respect for your body of work — especially for your work on open culture and on the
issue of money in politics.

But I do have to ask you how, as a member of the
Board of Advisors of Americans Elect, you continue to square your activism on behalf of the Americans Elect candidacy of Buddy Roemer — most memorably, in your treatise "One Way Forward"; in your appearances on "Morning Joe" (videos here and here); in your tweets; and in your recent Atlantic pieces (here and, today, here) — with the Americans Elect corporation's explicit policy on neutrality.

According to Section 10.0 of the Rules (pdf link) of Americans Elect (emphasis mine):

Until the Americans Elect ticket has been selected by majority vote of participating Delegates in the Nominating Round of voting, Americans Elect shall be neutral with respect to all Candidates and shall not endorse, oppose, advance, or advocate any particular Candidate.

You've highlighted the fact that your position as a member of the Board of Advisors of Americans Elect is "noncompensated" — but this, it seems to me, misses the point.

Surely, the straightforward, commonsense reading is
that Rule 10 is a broad mandate — that the "Americans
Elect" of the phrase "Americans Elect shall be neutral" includes both

1
the organization as a whole (as reflected in official decisions of the Board of Directors and the Board's committees)

and

2
the statements and actions of individual directors, executive staff and advisors of Americans Elect, i.e., those who — whether paid or unpaid — are officially and publicly signified by Americans Elect as supporters and representatives the organization.

Of course, one could argue that, no, Rule 10 applies only to (1); that directors and officers are bound by Sections 4.12 and 6.1 of the Bylaws (pdf link); and that advisors can say whatever they want.

But this seems more than a little Clintonian, as well as being a clear violation of the spirit, if not necessarily the letter, of Rule 10 — not least, because it implies (and creates) a loophole through which the Americans Elect corporation and its individual directors and officers can, by not expressing themselves directly, abide by the letter of the neutrality policy stated in the corporation's Rules and Bylaws, even as they violate the spirit of the policy by allowing and enabling various Americans Elect advisors to function as surrogates for expressing either the type of candidate or the specific candidate that
they — i.e., the corporation, or specific directors or officers or, for that matter, seed funders — prefer.

To be clear: I have no way of knowing whether you
are speaking for anyone else at Americans Elect, in advocating for Buddy Roemer (and, of late — albeit
more softly — for David Walker).

Absent being shown any evidence to the contrary, I assume that you are speaking only for yourself.

::   ::   ::

The truth is, Americans Elect seems never to have enforced its neutrality policy — and it certainly isn't
going to start enforcing it now, desperate as it is for a candidate.

But that doesn't make your own position as an Americans Elect advisor campaigning for a specific candidate any less ethically compromised.

If you or other Americans Elect advisors — or, for that matter, Americans Elect directors or executive staff members — wish to campaign for specific Americans Elect candidates, in the way that you have for Buddy Roemer (and David Walker), you are more than free to do so.

But if you are going to engage in this activity while the Americans Elect neutrality policy embodied in Rule 10 and in Bylaws 4.12 and 6.1 remains in place, you should step down from Americans Elect.

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

The other, and even more honest, option is for Americans Elect simply to go ahead and kill its neutrality policy — which, in any case, has been a farce all along.

::   ::   ::

Although I'd be gratified by a personal response to this query, the most useful place for you to address it would be on your public blog.

You can find a more comprehensive and integrated presentation — a "one-stop shop," if you like — of my own thoughts on this and other issues related to Americans Elect, in "The Super Shadow PAC of 'Centrism,'" the essay I link above.

I look forward to your response.

With respect,

JOHN LUMEA

UPDATE: Lessig's response and my follow-up is here.

About That "Draft Walker Poll" of966 Florida Registered Voters

In its launch press release of 23 April, the Committee
to Get Walker Running — a.k.a. Draft Walker — billed
itself as a

grassroots and youth-driven initiative to get our country’s fiscal house in order by drafting David Walker...as an independent candidate for president through Americans Elect.

A "grassroots and youth-driven initiative."

To be sure, the Committee is managed by Nick Troiano, who just last month stepped down from a 2-year stint as National Campus Director at Americans Elect, and who — at 22 — is himself barely a year out of Georgetown University.

And yet, the Committee — which is registered as a PAC with the FEC (pdf link) — claims to have conducted an April 2012 public opinion survey of 966 Florida registered voters, to gauge support for a David Walker candidacy.

Not generally the sort of activity that one associates with a project that is totally "grassroots" and "youth-driven."

::   ::   ::

LET'S HAVE a closer look, shall we?

The Committee's home page at DraftWalker.com* includes a rotator feature — right side, scroll down — that cites two results from a poll that explicitly is sourced as "Draft Walker poll of 966 Florida voters, +/- 3.15%, April 2012."

The two results are:

1
75% of voters believe an independent candidate
should take part in this fall's Presidential debates.

and

2
39% of voters are open to voting for David Walker
in this year's Presidential election.

A few more details about this poll — including the
specific date — are available from a "Draft David
Walker Overview" document that is part of a list of downloadable "Volunteer Resources" toward the
bottom of the Web site's "Get Involved" page.

This Overview document (pdf link) includes,
in a Frequently Asked Questions section, the
following:

Will the American people support this effort?

We recently conducted a public opinion survey to help answer that question. Results are based on an April 9th poll of 966 registered Florida voters (+/- 3.5%).

• After sharing some information about David Walker, 39% said they would be open to voting for him if his name appeared on the general election ballot.

• We found that his primary appeal to these voters is that his top issue is fiscal responsibility. This is no surprise given that 86% reported to be concerned (69% "very concerned") about our country's fiscal situation.

• Overwhelming support, 75%, was given to idea of an independent candidate being able to debate President Obama and the Republican nominee this fall.

::   ::   ::

CURIOUSLY, these hushed mentions — intermittently flashing at the bottom of the Draft Walker home page and buried in a Draft Walker volunteer document — appear to be the only two references to this large survey, by the Committee or anybody else.

But the scant information that the "grassroots and youth-driven" Committee to Get Walker Running provides about this "Draft Walker poll" still manages to tell us a number of important things:

• The survey included a relatively large sample
  of 966 registered voters in Florida.

• This was a telephone survey with a script of several questions and follow-up questions.

• The survey includes margins of error, and
  is presented as a scientific poll.

All of this suggests a survey that was designed, written and conducted by a professional pollster
or polling firm or PR/branding firm with polling capabilities — not a handful of college students and recent college graduates.

So here are a couple of questions for the Draft Walker committee...

1
Where can one access the full survey and results of
this 9 April 2012 telephone survey of 966 Florida
registered voters?

2
Which pollster or polling firm or PR/branding firm
actually ran this survey?

3
Is this pollster, polling firm or PR/branding firm connected — in any way — (a) to Americans Elect;
(b) to David Walker; or (c) to persons, firms or organizations who are connected to Americans Elect
or to David Walker?

::   ::   ::

THE OTHER QUESTION, of course, is: Who paid for this polling work?

Draft Walker — the Committee to Get Walker Running — may have paid for the work. Someone else, acting on the Committee's behalf, may have paid an individual pollster or firm directly for the work. Or a pollster or firm may have contributed all, or part, of the work pro bono.

Either way, the answers to all of these questions would put a good bit of meat on the bones of David Walker's confirmation of Neil Cavuto's observation that Draft Walker is "backing it up with money."

Walker went on to tell Cavuto that he himself is "not involved with" the Draft Walker committee, and that
he has "not had communications with them."

But veteran journalist Alexis Simendinger originally reported this week that Walker had "cooperated with" Committee treasurer and manager Nick Troiano.

In an email on Tuesday afternoon, I asked Simendinger about this; and I noticed yesterday evening that the intriguing "cooperated with" had been dialed back to
the somewhat labored "acknowledged the efforts of."

Still. This rather professional-sounding survey of
Florida voters is one of a number of clues that the "youth-driven" Committee to Get Walker Running
may be operating with more than a little bit of adult supervision — and the adult money that goes with it.

The question is: Who are the adults in this room?

* Attempting to visit the home page of DraftWalker.com
frequently generates a splash sign-up feature that obscures
the page. To make this pop-up disappear, simply click to
either side of the pop-up.

David Walker's Bio at the Draft Walker and No Labels Salon

It's very well known that Americans Elect advisory board member and draft candidate David Walker is the former Comptroller General of the United States.

It also is very well known that Walker is a co-founder of the group No Labels.

Indeed, Walker himself — in the statement he released last Tuesday, through his Comeback America Initiative — explicitly named No Labels as one of the things in his schedule that leaves little room for a presidential run right now:

I am not a candidate and don’t expect to become one. Rather, I am focused on
my many responsibilities, including serving...as a national co-founder
of No Labels and as a member of
A[mericans] E[lect]’s Board of Advisors.

And yet...

Had you visited NoLabels.org two days later — the same day that DraftWalker.com, the Web site of the Committee to Get Walker Running ("Draft Walker"), sprang to life — and had you scanned the "Our People" page, where for months Walker had been listed as a Co-Founder, you'd have come up empty. David Walker was nowhere to be found. Scrubbed.

Moreover...

When Draft Walker officially launched this past Monday, the committee did not mention Walker's role at No Labels (or, for that matter, his role at Americans Elect) in its press release — or in its bio of Walker — or in the editorial published the same day by committee co-chairs Yoni Gruskin and Ryan Schoenike.

::   ::   ::

By yesterday, David Walker's listing at NoLabels.org
had been restored — but with a difference.

On the "Our People" page at the No Labels site,
persons in various categories — from "Co-Founders" to "Citizen Leaders" to "Back Office Staff" — are presented initially as part of either a "grid" or a "list," with their names, photos and thumbnail biographical sketches. Clicking on any specific person's name directs to a dedicated page for that person, and sometimes this includes a slightly longer bio.

Here's a screenshot from the cache of David Walker's dedicated page at NoLabels.org, as it appeared on
April 5 — exactly two weeks before DraftWalker.com went from being a splash page to a full-fledged site (albeit a relatively simple one):

Click to enlarge.

At that time, as you can see, Walker's bio read:

Dave Walker has over 30-years of public, private and not-for-profit sector leadership experience. He has received three Presidential appointments with unanimous Senate confirmation from Presidents of both major parties, including his most recent as Comptroller General of the United States (1998-2008).

Here's a screenshot Walker's photo and thumbnail
bio, as it currently appears in the grid version of the
"Our People" page at NoLabels.org. The text of the bio
is the same, in the list version:

Click to enlarge.

Now, as you can see, Walker's bio reads:

Dave Walker has over 30-years of public, private and not-for-profit sector leadership experience.

Notice two things about David Walker's "new" bio at NoLabels.org.

First: The references to Walker's "three presidential appointments with unanimous Senate confirmation from Presidents of both major parties" and to his decade as Comptroller General of the United States have been deleted.

Second: It no longer is possible, as it was before — and as it remains with every other Co-Founder and, indeed, with every Citizen Leader and back office staffer on the larger No Labels list of "Our People" — to click Walker's name and get a dedicated photo-and-bio page for him.

::   ::   ::

What's up with all this shuffling and scissoring of
David Walker's bio?

Why is Draft Walker cropping David Walker's
No Labels and Americans Elect connections — if, in
fact, that's what it's doing?

Why, in its bio of David Walker, did No Labels trim the reference to his presidential appointments, including the one — Comptroller General — that anchors his brand as
a fiscal reform advocate?

Why is the biography of the tonsorially challenged Walker getting all these haircuts?

Perhaps even more to the point: Who is ordering them?

Another Question or Two for Mr. Walker of Americans Elect

David Walker wears a lot of hats.

• Former Comptroller General of the United States.

• Co-founder of No Labels.

• Beneficiary of Pete Peterson.

• Member of the Americans Elect Board of Advisors.

• Draft candidate of Americans Elect.

To name just a few.

Recently, Walker talked to the Washington Post (emphasis mine):

[Americans Elect founder and lead investor Peter] Ackerman's enlistment of advisers is formidable....

And from those advisers may come Americans Elect’s face-saving option. In the past month,
a small group of activists has emerged to recruit Dave Walker, an independent who
once ran the Government Accountability
Office, to run for president. Walker, who is
on the Americans Elect board of advisers, said that he knew about the effort and that an Americans Elect employee had stepped down to lead the draft movement. Also
in recent weeks, Americans Elect changed
the requirements Walker needs to meet to
win the nomination, revising the number of online supporters to 1,000 in 10 states
instead of 5,000 in 10 states.

“This is an issue-oriented movement, and they’re trying to put a face to the movement,” Walker said in a phone interview. He said his mission has long been deficit reduction and
the reorganization of the national debt. “For whatever reason, they believe I’m a person who symbolizes that. I guess they kind of view me as a means to an end.”

He remained, however, undecided: “My mama told me a long time ago you never say never.”

On Tuesday morning — the day after the Washington Post ran its piece on Monday — Walker released the following statement through his Comeback America Initiative (emphasis mine):

Reports in the media have mentioned an
effort to draft me as a candidate for President through the Americans Elect (AE) process, and I want to clarify my position. I am aware of this recent independent movement to draft me, which is an initiative by people who evidently share my views regarding the need for fiscal, political and other major reforms to keep America great. Importantly, their effort is unrelated to the Comeback America Initiative (CAI), No Labels, and AE organizations.

While I appreciate and am humbled by their efforts, I am not a candidate and don't expect to become one. Rather, I am focused on my many responsibilities, including serving as
CEO of the non-partisan CAI, as a national co-founder of No Labels, and as a member
of AE's Board of Advisors.

And then, by nightfall on Tuesday — be warned that, if you don't already have whiplash, you may be about to get it — Walker was out with a tweet saying (emphasis mine):

I am not a candidate for public office but will seriously consider it if the Independent Draft Committee qualifies me for the AE ballot. DW

::   ::    ::

Nobody does Americans Elect forensics better than Jim Cook at Irregular Times. And there's very little that I could say, about the connections and disconnections that Walker revealed with these three forays, that Cook didn't already say in his masterfully crisp untangling, on Tuesday evening — before word of Walker's tweeted re-reconsideration began making the rounds on Wednesday morning — of the web of relationships between Unity08, the 2008 Draft Bloomberg committee, Americans Elect, No Labels, Pete Peterson, David Walker and a 2012 Draft Walker committee.

But there is one — OK, a two-in-one — question that especially comes up for me right now, and I'd like to
put this to David Walker...

Mr. Walker, you make reference to "the Independent Draft Committee" and to "this recent independent movement to draft me." You are able to say what "they believe" — and this evidently is a specific "they," since you also are able to speak with declarative confidence in asserting that "their effort is unrelated" to three specific organizations. You even — according to the Washington Post — "knew about the effort and that an Americans Elect employee had stepped down to lead" it.

So, I have to ask...

Exactly which "Independent Draft Committee" —
and which former Americans Elect staffer — are
you talking about?

(Please don't think me rude, everybody, but the rest
of this is addressed to Mr. Walker. Do stick around, though.)

One might hope, I suppose, that someone who liked Americans Elect well enough to go work for it, and who then left the organization to draft someone else who actually was on the Board of Advisors of Americans Elect, would use AmericansElect.org to do the drafting.

Your profile at AmericansElect.org lists only one draft committee — the "'Let's get it done' draft committee for David Walker" — and two leaders of that committee: John Knubel and Richard Sulkovsky.

Is this "the Independent Draft Committee" — and is either John Knubel or Richard Sulkovsky the former employee of Americans Elect — that you're talking
about? Or is this the committee — but the former
staffer is behind the scenes and unnamed?

Or...

I notice that, among the Twitter accounts that re-tweeted your Tuesday night tweet were these two:

1
Rise of the Center — which is associated with the Web site of "centrist" politics run by Solomon Kleinsmith

2
Draft David Walker — which is associated with the Web site DraftWalker.com

Interestingly, a Whois search reveals that Kleinsmith is listed as the registrar of the DraftWalker.com URL.

Yesterday morning, DraftWalker.com was nothing more than a splash page, with this logo

Screenshot of DraftWalker.org, 19 April 2012 a.m.

and this sign-up form.

Screenshot of DraftWalker.org, 19 April 2012 a.m. (click to enlarge)

I noticed that this page was "Paid for by the Committee to Get Walker Running," and that the contact email was [email protected]

This group seemed to have set up a YouTube channel on Tuesday, and posted its first two videos yesterday (albeit with no credit to "the Committee to Get Walker Running.")

And, by early yesterday afternoon, there was a full-blown Web site — for how long had this been queued up? — listing the committee co-chairs as Yoni Gruskin and Ryan Schoenike.

A news item on the site even goes so far as to characterize the Washington Post report — including
your comments? — as a "preview" of the committee's efforts.

The committee still has the same name. And although the telephone number — 202-670-6365 — did, when I tried it, direct to a message from "the Committee to Get Walker Running," I couldn't help but notice the new contact email: [email protected]

Screenshot of DraftWalker.org, 19 April 2012 p.m. (click to enlarge)

So, is this "the Independent Draft Committee" — and
is Yoni Gruskin, Ryan Schoenike or Solomon Kleinsmith the former Americans Elect staffer — you're talking about? Or is this the committee — but the former staffer is behind the scenes and unnamed? (On LinkedIn, only Kleinsmith, of the three, cites any formal connection
to Americans Elect — but he lists himself only as a "Delegate Leader" of Americans Elect, and these are unpaid, i.e., free-labor, volunteer positions.)

Or...

Is there altogether some other committee that a former employee of Americans Elect "stepped down to lead"?

::   ::   ::

Oh, and, while you're here — sorry, I know I promised to ask just a couple of questions, but I do have one more...

You were careful to point out, in the statement that you released on Tuesday morning, that you are "focused on [your] many responsibilities, including serving as...a national co-founder of No Labels" (video at 0:02).

So why are you now scrubbed from the No Labels leader list?

 

Postscript: Jim Cook — whose tenacious and indispensable new analysis went up a couple of
hours before this more generally scoped piece — drills beneath many of the surfaces I scratch here and comes up with much new information. Ultimately, though, David Walker needs to answer all of these questions himself.

Depends What You Mean By "Reform"

The Big Hitch in Lawrence Lessig's Plan to "'Occupy' AmericansElect.org"

There is a moment, about two and a half minutes in
to Buddy Roemer's appearance with Americans Elect advisory board member Lawrence Lessig last month,
on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" (video), when Roemer
very emphatically — in a way that makes it clear that
this is the one message he wants the audience to remember — says:

"And the issue is reform — the issue is reform."

This dovetails very conveniently — perhaps
a little too conveniently — with Lessig's own
message in his compelling new pocket treatise,
One Way Forward, in which Lessig calls for citizens
to "'occupy' AmericansElect.org." Lessig discussed
this with the historian and journalist Colin Woodard,
for a piece that appeared a few weeks ago in the Washington Monthly.

Specifically, Lessig writes (emphases mine):

Become a delegate. Today. Make reform your number-one issue. Work to convince other AE delegates that this number-one issue for you should be the number-one issue for Americans Elect. And then cast your ballot only for a candidate who promises reform first.

Lay aside, for a moment, the fact that, in promoting —
and, indeed, campaigning with — Buddy Roemer as the "reform" candidate for whom Americans Elect delegates should be casting,* while at the same time serving in an official capacity as member of the Board of Advisors of Americans Elect, Lessig is in violation of both the spirit and the letter of the corporation's strict policy on neutrality (Section 10 of the corporate Rules and Sections 4.12 and 6.1 of the By-Laws).

Lessig's plan calls for Americans Elect delegates to use AmericansElect.org as the mechanism through which to identify and organize as "reform" delegates, and then to vote for a "reform" candidate.

Could Lessig's Web-based plan actually work?

::   ::   ::

NOT IF Americans Elect delegates would be relying on the Americans Elect Web site, to know what candidates mean by "reform."

Let's take another walk in the weeds, shall we?

Click in to any candidate profile at AmericansElect.org, and you'll see a list of nine "Priorities" — Economy, Education, Energy, Environment, Foreign Policy, Health Care, Immigration, Reform, and Social Issues — each with a numerical percentage that is meant to indicate the relative importance of that Priority to the candidate.

Screenshot from AmericansElect.org

Americans Elect uses this same list of nine Priorities to organize a much longer list of hundreds of multiple-choice questions — called the "True Colors" survey — that the corporation invites delegates to answer at AmericansElect.org (under "Colors"). Each question is identified as an Environment question, a Foreign Policy Question, a Reform question, and so on.

At the outset of this True Colors process, delegates
are asked to "Rank Your Priorities," then are invited
to answer nine "core questions," one question for each
of the Priorities.

The Web site uses these nine answers and self-
rankings to generate, for each delegate, a ranked
listing of "matches" — declared and draft candidates who, according to the "matching algorithm" at AmericansElect.org, most closely share the Priorities
of the delegate.

So, one would think that the definitions of the Priorities themselves — for example, the framing of "Reform" that Americans Elect uses for delegates and the framing of "Reform" that it uses for candidates — should, well...match. Yes?

Think again.

::   ::   ::

DELEGATES who begin the True Colors process are shown a wheel, like a pie — with each slice representing one of the nine Priorities.

Adjacent to the pie is a set of nine draggable sliders, each slider corresponding to one of the Priorities. As the delegate adjusts all of the sliders to reflect how s/he "ranks" the Priorities, the pie slices fill up with colors to reflect this weighting.

Screenshot from AmericansElect.org (click to read "Reform" pop-up)

Hovering over either the "Reform" slice of the pie or the "Reform" slider reveals the following explanatory pop-up text, which obviously is intended to guide the delegate in deciding how to rank this Priority:

Government regulation, campaign finance reform, judicial reform, legislative reform, electoral reform

Which is what most people — including Lessig — mean by "reform."

And, as one gets deeper into the True Colors survey,
the "Reform" questions do cover these sorts of issues.

But, once a delegate has completed the "Rank Your Priorities" section, the initial "core question" on
"Reform" — the one Americans Elect uses to help establish a delegate's candidate "matches" — would seem to have little at all to do with the establishing commonsense framing of "Reform" that is used
in the pop-up.

Screenshot from AmericansElect.org (click to read "Reform" question)

Which of the following comes closest to
your personal opinion?

A. To make this country great, we should return to the examples and values of our forefathers.

B. This country is already great, we shouldn't change a thing.

C. To make this country great, we should keep building and adapting for the future.

::   ::   ::

HERE'S where things start to get complicated.

Go to any candidate profile, and you'll see that the ambiguous "Reform" question and responses above are the same ones that Americans Elect uses to tell delegates and the public (1) what "reform" means to a given candidate and, given that definition, (2) how important "reform" is to the candidate.

Screenshot from AmericansElect.org (click to read "Reform" question)

But the candidates have not framed or answered this question themselves. Nor have they assigned their own ranking to the Priority to which this or any other of the questions and answers are meant to correspond.

Rather, Americans Elect pulls this information from OnTheIssues.org, a Web-based research service that tries to sift the votes and public statements of political figures into a matrix of various ranges of answers to questions.

The "answers" are not the actual answers of these figures. Rather, they are symbolic answers created by the On the Issues service; and these "answers" correspond to equally symbolic keywords and phrases, also developed by the service, to which the service has assigned actual "citations," in the form of a political figure's votes and public statements.

In other words: On the Issues has "plugged in" to its
own framework — as represented by its "questions" and "answers" — the on-the-record votes and comments of political figures.

Evidently, Americans Elect has contracted with On
the Issues to create, for the candidate profiles that appear at AmericansElect.org, a special "cut" of nine Priorities questions (and corresponding "answers") — based on the existing OnTheIssues.org database — called the "AmericansElect quiz." A "10th question" creates the relative weighting of candidates' "responses" to the first nine. These weightings are the percentages that appear in the Priorities graphic in Americans Elect candidate profiles.

From the explanation of the "AmericansElect quiz" at OnTheIssues.org (emphases mine):

The 10th question is the "weighting" for the first nine quiz questions. We weight the questions based on the relative number of citations for each question. If a candidate talks a lot about a particular issue, we include more citations on that issue; and hence that question gets weighted more....we infer each candidate's relative importance of an issue by how often that candidate talks about the issue....

We use a "framework for analysis" to associate each citation to an answer choice. For each possible quiz answer, we list keywords that
we associate with that answer choice. If a politician talks about the issue using the keyword listed below, we assign that answer (assuming the rest of the citation hints at that same answer — keywords might also
be used negatively!).

So, in theory, AmericansElect.org could flag someone as a "reform" candidate, simply because that person had spoken in ways that criticized "reform" or that ridiculed "reformers," and had spoken in these ways — a lot — using words and phrases that rang the bell of the On the Issues "framework for analysis."

::   ::   ::

BUT HERE'S WHERE the wheels really fall off of Lessig's plan — at least, to the extent that Lessig seems to see AmericansElect.org as a sufficient logistical resource for Americans Elect delegates committed to "reform," as he defines it, to identify, support and vote for an Americans Elect candidate who shares the same commitment.

Bear in mind that it is the Americans Elect corporation that has decided that this question...

Which of the following comes closest to your personal opinion?

coupled with one of these three "answers"...

A. To make this country great, we should return to the examples and values of our forefathers.

B. This country is already great, we shouldn't change a thing.

C. To make this country great, we should keep building and adapting for the future.

are all that any Americans Elect delegate needs to
know, in order to:

1
determine both what Candidate X basically
means by "reform" and, given that definition,
what "priority" that candidate places on
"reform"; and to

2
trust that the candidates that Americans Elect
"matches" to her, using this information, are
indeed reliable matches.

Recall, however, that On the Issues generates a political figure's "answers" by associating his or her specific on-the-record citations — votes, public statements — with one or more keywords and phrases that On the Issues has selected to signify that "answer."

Only by taking stock of all the keywords and phrases
that drive the three "answers" to the question on "Reform" can one fully understand how Americans
Elect is using the term "reform" on its Web site.

Why this matters: Since Americans Elect uses this
same question-and-"answers" combo on "Reform,"
both in candidate profiles and as the "core question"
on "Reform" in the delegate True Colors survey, the meaning of "reform" on which this Q-and-"A" trades features prominently in how Americans Elect uses "reform" to make delegate-candidate "matches" at AmericansElect.org.

So, here, from the "AmericansElect quiz" at OnTheIssues.org — question number 9 — is the
"Reform" question and the "answers," together with
the corresponding bulleted keywords and phrases that explain what the "answers" really mean.

You won't find this at AmericansElect.org.

Which of the following comes closest to your personal opinion?

A. To make this country great, we should return to the examples and values of our forefathers.

• Founding Principles

• Citing Founding Fathers

• Citing original Constitution

• Remove 10th amendment / 14th amendment

• "No foreign entanglements" (as a constitutional principle rather than as unilateralism)

• Free trade (if an issue of principle rather than a specific trade agreement)

B. This country is already great, we shouldn't change a thing.

• Maintain our sovereignty

• Support our troops

• American first

• Love it or leave it

• America is unique / light on the hill / an idea / shining city

• American exceptionalism

• American armed forces second to none

• Peace through strength

• Increase defense spending

• Restrict free trade (if on principle rather than a specific trade agreement)

C. To make this country great, we should keep building and adapting for the future.

• No Pax Americana

• No American empire

• End military adventurism

• Don't police the world

• America's long-term future

• Close all / most U.S. bases abroad

• Reduce American armed forces

• Decrease defense spending

• Free trade benefits both sides (if on principle rather than a specific trade agreement

::   ::    ::

THIS DRILL-DOWN is what lies beneath the "Reform" Priority in the online profile of every declared and draft candidate at AmericansElect.org.

Two things stand out. First: An Americans Elect candidate presented as picking "answers" A, B or C still could be presented as a candidate of "reform" — even though these "answers" can be diametrically opposed.

Second: The notion of "reform" that emerges here has to do with U.S. military and defense (and, to a lesser degree, trade) policy as refracted through various competing ideas about war and peace; nation building; and empire.

This obscure framing of "Reform" has nothing to do with the commonsense framing — "government regulation, campaign finance reform, judicial reform, legislative reform, electoral reform" — that Americans Elect uses to invite a delegate to consider how to rank "Reform" as a Priority, in the first section of the True Colors survey.

Nor, in guiding a delegate directly from this "Rank
Your Priorities" section of the survey to a "core questions" section in which the "Reform" question is wired to the obscure framing, does the interface at AmericansElect.org either (1) alert the delegate to the disconnect or (2) explain the connections between (a) the obscure framing, (b) the echo of the obscure framing in the candidate profiles, (c) the "AmericansElect quiz" at OnTheIssues.org, and (d) the use of both the obscure and the commonsense framing in the Americans Elect delegate-candidate "matching algorithm."

To be clear: On the "Reform" Priority, this "matching algorithm" is wired for failure. The algorithm seeks to make the closest delegate-candidate correlations, using for each a combined index of (1) one's perspective on "Reform" and (2) the level of importance that one attaches to that perspective, relative to one's perspective on eight other Priorities. For candidates, both the "perspective" and the "level" sides of the index are
based on the obscure framing of "Reform." But, for the delegate, the "level" side of the index is pegged to the commonsense framing and the "perspective" side to the obscure. Under these conditions, it simply is not possible for the algorithm to generate a reliable delegate-candidate "match" on "Reform."

Most problematic for Lawrence Lessig, this obscure military-defense-trade framing of "Reform" is not, in any way, the notion of reform that Lessig had in mind when he called on citizens to "'occupy' AmericansElect.org,"
in part, by using the site to identify and "cast [their] ballot[s] only for a candidate who promises reform first."

Lessig's chosen candidate, Buddy Roemer, told Joe Scarborough — twice in a row — that "the issue is reform."

But it's hard to imagine that Lessig has done his due diligence on this. Even Buddy Roemer right now is listed in his profile at AmericansElect.org as having made the "Economy" — not "Reform" — his top Priority.

Screenshot from AmericansElect.org (click to enlarge)

And, as we've seen, even if Roemer was flagged on his profile with the icon showing "Reform" as his "Highest Priority," it wouldn't mean what Lessig means.

The truth is, it's highly unlikely that delegates will be able to "'occupy' AmericansElect.org" for reform.

But, if they wish to try, they won't be able to use the Americans Elect Web site to find out who the true
reform candidates are.

* Lessig, in One Way Forward, also promotes Starbucks Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz as a possible Americans Elect "reform" candidate.

Throwing Down the Gauntlet or Throwing in the Towel?

Democracy Divided By Duopoly Equals Americans Elect

In the course of riffing on Paul Harris's incisive take on the current state of Americans Elect, published this week in the Guardian — if you haven't yet read this, please do — Jason Linkins tried to argue that

while most third parties assemble around a set of core values and then go about seeking like-minded statesmen to run under that banner, Americans Elect decided right off the bat that they weren't really for anything — only that some third party needed to exist to prove that people wanted third parties to exist. All of the stuff about having a belief system and a candidate would come after the organization obtained ballot access. So if you want to imagine Americans Elect's vision of the future, picture a horse, standing behind a cart, forever.

But that's not quite right. As I pointed out to Linkins in
a private email (which, obviously, wasn't that private):

Of course, Americans Elect's leaders and backers do have a set of core values — it's just that they like to pretend that they don't, since, at least on paper, they're supposed to be "opening up the process."

Over the last couple of weeks, however, there have
been signs that Americans Elect is getting a little more honest with the public about what it wants to do with its core values centrist agenda — and also, perhaps, more honest with itself about the limits of what it can do with its values agenda in 2012.

Forget all the talk of "revolution" and "people power"
and picking "a president, not a party."

What Americans Elect's top leaders and most prominent supporters now are openly admitting is that it's come down to this deep hedging of the Americans Elect bet:

Americans Elect is one group of Establishment Rs and Ds trying to give an ultimatum to another group of slightly less-Establishment Rs and Ds.

:: :: ::

ONE COULD DATE the start of the new glasnost policy at Americans Elect to two weeks ago, when Americans Elect dispatched two of its top leaders — director Christie Todd Whitman, a moderate Republican, and advisory board member David Boren, a conservative Democrat — on a quick media tour of Politico and PBS, in which the leaders framed Americans Elect explicitly as not having anything revolutionary in mind — on PBS Newshour, both Boren and Whitman were careful to declare their fealty to their respective parties — but, rather, as being a more targeted effort simply to reform the existing Democratic and Republican parties along centrist lines.

In the Politico op-ed, the authors (joined by former defense secretary Bill Cohen) wrote that "[t]he
American people should challenge the two parties and their presidential candidates to make three ironclad commitments" — in brief: (1) Simpson-Bowles, (2) a "national unity government" with leaders from "both parties" in the Cabinet, and (3) campaign spending limits, with contributions restricted to eligible voters.

Then came the "or else":

If the party leaders ignore these serious challenges, then it is time for the voters to consider another alternative...Americans Elect.

Americans Elect, they said, would produce "a bipartisan ticket," and they generously suggested two possible choices: either "a Democrat and Republican" or "a Republican and a Democrat."

The point of this effort (emphasis mine):

A victory by this ticket with this approach could be the “shock therapy” needed to get the two-party system working again.

:: :: ::

THAT framing — Americans Elect as "the 'shock therapy' needed to get the two-party system working again" — is very different from anything you'll see in the governing documents of Americans Elect (the corporate Rules and By-Laws).

It's very different from anything on the Americans Elect Web site, which says that "[t]he goal of Americans Elect is to nominate a presidential ticket that answers directly to voters — not the political system."

It's very different from the message that Americans Elect is selling on Twitter or on Facebook, where two of its top stories today are about how "the two-party system" is "getting old" and about how this system "divides our government" and "stands in the way of progress."

It's very different from anything that Americans Elect leaders like COO Elliot Ackerman and advisory board member Mark McKinnon have been saying in their ubiquitous appearances on MSNBC.

:: :: ::

AND, yet — likely, in part, because Americans Elect really needs the backing of insiders like Whitman and Boren — this seems to be the new, smaller message that Americans Elect is selling: a message that talks tough on ideology but that leaves the two "major" parties firmly in control, even as it tries to nudge them toward the "center."

Americans Elect pulsed this message again, early this week, with a press release highlighting comments by advisory board member John Backus, who put it even more bluntly than did Whitman, Boren and Cohen (emphasis mine):

The idea behind Americans Elect is to force the two parties to the center where they
will compromise....

Force the two parties to the center.

Then, a couple of days ago, Thomas Friedman took to
the Times to — once again — regale his readers with
his utopian fantasies of a magical place in which the sun never sets on right-wing Democrats and left-wing Republicans, who, together with unicorns and bunny rabbits, amidst kool-aid streams and lollipop trees, play jump rope with rainbows all day long.

The "radical center," Friedman called it last summer, when he became the original Big Media benefactor of Americans Elect — the one to tell his friends in the Establishment that "it's OK to like this."

This week, writing from New Zealand, Friedman
lamented (emphasis mine):

"Looking at America from here, makes me
feel as though we have the worst of all worlds right now. The days when there were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, who nudged the two parties together, appear over [and] we lack any credible Third Party that could capture enough of the center to force" — there's that word, again — "both Democrats and Republicans to compete for votes there."

In spirit, this actually is similar to what Friedman suggested in his roll-out of Americans Elect, eight months ago. Americans Elect, he wrote then
(emphasis mine):

will not only be on the ballot in every state but be able to take part in every presidential debate and challenge both parties from the middle with the best ideas on how deal with the debt, education and jobs.

Even if Americans Elect manages to get on the ballot in most, or all 50, states, its wing-clipped messaging of recent days suggests that, in the House of Ackerman, political reality is coming home to roost, and that the second part of Friedman's projection — a spot in the general-election debates — may be where Americans Elect has adjusted its sights for this election cycle.

:: :: ::

TOM FRIEDMAN might still be dreaming of a centrist "Third Party" — Bat Signal to Americans Elect — but it seems clear that Americans Elect itself is in the expectations-managing mode of scaling back and
moving on from that ambition, at least for 2012.

Americans Elect finds itself in this position, in part, because — as Paul Harris and others have noted — it simply has failed to attract a political celebrity as a "headlining" candidate. Even the leaders of Americans Elect always have acknowledged that a political celebrity was what this effort required. But, at this late date, it's hard to imagine that anybody apart from Michael Bloomberg (and his cash) would be able to flip the switch on a serious Americans Elect candidacy.

Certainly, if what Americans Elect wants is a ticket that will "force" the hands of Republicans and Democrats in Washington, Buddy Roemer — currently in the lead, among the declared Americans Elect candidates — doesn't look like much of an Enforcer.

Of course, "the two parties" always have loomed large, for Americans Elect. What seems clear, though — especially from the apparent "downsizing" of Americans Elect as primarily a "rescue mission" aimed simply at making "the two parties" better versions of themselves — is that younger guns like CEO Kahlil Byrd and COO Elliot Ackerman might have underestimated just how large these parties loomed.

It's not that "forcing the two parties to the center," as John Backus put it, was not always one of the ideas "behind Americans Elect." But was it always, as Backus now claims, "the" idea? Was the main point always the one identified by Whitman, Boren and Cohen: simply to provide "the 'shock therapy' needed to get the two-party system working again"?

Given everything else that I know about Americans Elect, I am prepared to concede the possibility that the
answers to these questions are "yes," and that all the anti-system rhetoric that Americans Elect has, for months, been pushing through various media channels has been nothing but marketing claptrap designed to entice unsuspecting idealists to visit the Web site, register and become verified delegates.

But it also seems reasonable to conclude that this anti-system message has reflected the genuine, albeit corrupted, desire on the part of a significant portion of the Leadership of Americans Elect to do something more than try to make "the two parties" behave in ways that are consistent with these leaders' own preferences.

In light of the latter possibility, the new messaging
points to an Americans Elect that is beginning to cut its losses — possibly, in part, because powerful Americans Elect leaders like Christie Whitman and David Boren are not prepared to go "all the way" with this project, absent a political star to carry the banner.

At the end of the day, the true democratic promise of an open, Web-based nominating process and a 50-state ballot line has come up against the two-party duopoly; and the truth is that — once the built-in discount of Americans Elect's "bipartisan," "centrist" agenda is figured in as an offset — not much is left over.

In other words: When seen through the lens of what Americans Elect could have been, stripped of its ideological pretensions...

[Democracy] ÷ [D + R] = [meh]

Independent, Schmindependent

Forget the Rules and the Rhetoric, the
Reality Is That Americans Elect Is All
About the Duopoly

The telltale signs have been telling the tale for
some time now.

A big caption on the Americans Elect home page proclaims, in bold caps: A BIPARTISAN CHOICE
IN 2012. Just beneath that, the explanation
(emphasis mine): "Finalists must choose a running
mate from a different party."

To clear up any doubts about which "parties" Americans Elect has in mind, there is a helpful graphic of a handshake, and the two hands are festooned with cufflinks — an elephant on the left, a donkey on
the right. Crossing the aisle. Get it?

Dig a little deeper, and Section 2.1.2 of the corporate Rules of Americans Elect stipulates that every "Declared Candidate" is to submit a signed "Candidate Pledge," according to which, "as a condition of candidacy for Americans Elect nomination for President of the United States, I agree to accept the nomination and I pledge to" (emphasis mine):

Build the first coalition of my Presidency by selecting a Vice Presidential running mate who will help me forge the essential coalitions of members of the major parties to meet the crucial issues identified by the Americans Elect Delegates....

In Section 3.1.2 of the Rules, a corollary "Draft Committee Pledge" obligates draft committees to
"urge the Drafted Candidate" to make the same pledge.

Then, a little further down the scroll, there is Section 8
of the Rules, the "Balanced Ticket Obligation," under which (emphases mine)

The Presidential and Vice Presidential ticket nominated by Americans Elect shall, as nearly as practicable, consist of persons of differing ideological perspective or positions...to result
in a balanced coalition ticket responsive to
the vast majority of citizens while remaining independent of special interests and the partisan interests of either major political party. Subject to reversal by majority vote
of all registered Delegates, the Candidate Certification Committee shall determine whether any proposed ticket is balanced...."

And what is the basic, automatic threshold of "balance"? Two sentences down (emphasis mine)...

A ticket with two persons consisting of
a Democrat and a Republican shall be
deemed to be balanced.

No other ticket configuration is mentioned as being "deemed to be balanced."

:: :: ::

ALL OF THIS would seem to suggest a stacked deck.

And yet, just six weeks ago, on 9 February, Americans Elect COO Elliot Ackerman, appearing with Americans Elect advisory board member Mark McKinnon, told Dylan Ratigan (video starting at 4:56) that (emphases mine):

You know, the problem we see at Americans Elect is, we have two minority parties in
this country. The plurality of Americans are independent, and they are shut out of what is a closed process. So, at Americans Elect, we're offering every registered voter in this country the opportunity to participate in a nominating process to put an independent ticket on the ballot in all 50 states, for the presidency.

Ackerman continued (emphases mine):

The problem that we have right now is
that we have a political system that's rigged. And all the ideas have to be funneled into
two separate and narrow ideologies,
and that doesn't leave enough room for
true solutions-based policies to emerge.
So what we're doing is opening the process
up, by having a spot on the ballot for an independent candidate to emerge.

And (emphases mine):

What we take so much heart in is, nearly
half a million Americans [more like 400,000,
at that point] have signed up to participate through Americans Elect. These are people
who don't want to quit. These are people who reject the idea that it has to be a binary choice in 2012. And they are people who want to see an independent candidate emerge who can put forth some real, credible solutions outside of the two major parties.

A couple of weeks later, on 21 February, Ackerman
and McKinnon were back on MSNBC, this time with
Chuck Todd, who introduced the segment (video)
this way (emphases mine):

Well it was twenty years ago, this month,
that three was the company in the Presidential race. Ross Perot jumped in against George Bush and Bill Clinton, becoming the last serious candidate to run as an independent and make an impact. Could this be the year we see another third-party candidate get a real shot...?

Shortly into the segment (starting at 1:56), Ackerman notes (emphases mine):

We've seen hundreds of thousands of
people show up. They're very interested in
the idea that they could have a voice that doesn't have to modulate between the
two major parties....By the end of June,
there'll be a ticket that emerges — it'll
be an independent ticket....

On the same day, 21 February, Americans Elect sent
out an actual press release promoting former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker, one of the newest members of its Leadership team. Just a couple of days before that, Thomas Friedman, Americans Elect's own John the Baptist, had devoted an entire column to why he thought Walker should run for President.

Walker is registered as — you guessed it — an independent.

A week earlier, another member of the Americans Elect Leadership team, Doug Schoen — who also is a paid consultant to Americans Elect — was up on the Daily Beast with a piece speculating on what would happen "if a new candidate enters as an independent through the Americans Elect process" (emphasis mine).

Schoen hammered the word "independent" seventeen times, in this op-ed-length piece.

:: :: ::

SO WHAT WAS UP with all this "independent" talk?

Was Americans Elect just trying to show how
maverick-y it was?

Was it pandering to independent voters, in an effort
to boost its low delegate numbers?

Was it sending Bat Signals to Michael Bloomberg?

Almost certainly, all of these dynamics were at play.
But the other possibility, however remote, was that Americans Elect actually was starting to play by its
own corporate Rules.

After all: Apart from the presumption in favor of a D-R
or an R-D ticket — remember that, in Section 8 of the Rules, only these two configurations "shall be deemed to be balanced" — the only explicit prohibition, in the Rules or the By-Laws, comes in the next sentence of Rule 8, which says that "a ticket with two persons of the same political party shall be deemed to be imbalanced."

There is one sentence in the Overview to the Rules which specifies that "any Independent Presidential candidate must select a Vice Presidential candidate who balances the Presidential candidate’s positions...."

But, based on Rule 8, this is the case for any Presidential candidate — so the specific injunction to Independent candidates seems redundant.

Assuming that it is Rule 8 that governs, there are a multitude of possible ticket configurations. Indeed, according to a strict reading of the Rules and By-Laws of Americans Elect, each of the following configurations could be legitimate. Of course, substituting for "'Minor' Party" the specifics of "Green," "Libertarian," "Reform," or what have you, grows the possibilities even further.

Could this have been part of what Americans Elect leader and consultant Doug Schoen meant, when he wrote "independent" 17 times in one op-ed?

Was it what Americans Elect COO Elliot Ackerman meant, when he told Dylan Ratigan last month that "what we're doing is opening the process up"?

:: :: ::

NO, actually.

Indeed, the clear takeaway from this past week's media (self-) outings by Americans Elect is that Ackerman
the Younger was overplaying "independent."

If you want to know what Americans Elect really means by "independent," you have to pay attention to the paid consultant, Schoen, who, in his Daily Beast column, consistently links "independent" to "centrist" and — at least as important — to "bipartisan" (emphases mine):

In 1992, when Ross Perot ran for president — the last centrist candidate to make a serious run as an independent....

and

Twenty-four percent said they would vote for an independent, bipartisan unity ticket....

and

[S]upport for an independent was still at
25 percent, as one quarter said they would
vote for “an alternative unity ticket with a Democrat and a Republican as president and vice president....

In this view, "independent" means "not the Democratic Party ticket and not the Republican Party ticket, but still using D and R as the basic building blocks."

In other words: Not really independent, at all.

:: :: ::

AMERICANS ELECT couldn't have made this message
any clearer than it did when it dispatched two former governors, over the course of the last week — director Christie Todd Whitman and advisory board member David Boren — for a carefully curated "one-two," with one news organization whose orientation, to the extent that one can specify these things, is center-right and another that leans center-left.

First up, last Friday, Whitman and Boren were joined by former defense secretary Bill Cohen in a Politico op-ed in which the authors frame Americans Elect as an effort to reform the Democratic and Republican parties by way of an ultimatum:

The American people should challenge the
two parties and their presidential candidates
to make three ironclad commitments:

First, candidates of both parties should endorse the main principles contained in the Simpson-Bowles bipartisan budget proposal....

Second, [they] should create a national unity government by including leaders from both parties in the Cabinet....

Third, [they] should commit to support
a statutory approach or, if required, a constitutional amendment which permits
a limit on campaign spending and allows
only individual citizens eligible to vote in
each election to contribute....

If the party leaders ignore these serious challenges, then it is time for the voters to consider another alternative...Americans Elect.

But, as the writers quickly reassure, this "alternative" isn't meant to be that much of a threat to the donkeys and the elephants. Pay careful attention to the words they use. You can be sure that they and Americans Elect have (emphases mine):

[Americans Elect] has set up a process...to select the first bipartisan presidential ticket in U.S. history. The ticket candidates for president and vice president would be required to be from different parties.

For example, a Democrat and Republican would run as a team. If elected, they could form a truly bipartisan cabinet and administration.

Americans Elect will likely obtain the petition signatures needed to place a bipartisan ticket on the ballot in all 50 states this November. Millions of Americans have already signed the petitions. A victory by this ticket with this approach could be the “shock therapy” needed to get the two party system working again.

An alternative ticket may help get America’s leaders back to their greatest responsibility — “governing.” Voters must also, of course, carefully evaluate the Americans Elect ticket, with a Republican and a Democrat, to determine whether it merits endorsement and support.

Yes, "a Democrat and Republican" — "for example." The conventionally bipartisan vision of the Establishmentariat, as channeled by three of its scions.

A couple of days later, on Monday evening, Whitman
and Boren reinforced this message in a PBS Newshour segment that had been taped a few days earlier.

Unfortunately (from a journalistic perspective), segment anchor Judy Woodruff seeded the message both in her promotional tweet on Monday

and in her lead-in to the segment itself, which Woodfruff framed this way (emphases mine):

With rhetoric heating up and calls for bipartisanship growing across the country, a new group called Americans Elect is pushing
a new way. The nonprofit says it will secure ballot access for a unity ticket — one Democrat, one Republican — in all 50
states in November.

In the segment, Boren closes the loophole of the Politico op-ed's more general call to "include leaders from both parties in the Cabinet." Here, he has specific numbers in mind: "half Democrat, half Republican." Like the FEC. No other representation required.

Even the suggestion that he might be supporting an independent draws from Boren's lips a pitched "No!"

In a brief video chat the next day, Judy Woodruff asked Americans Elect Chief Technology Officer Josh Levine:

Are you saying there's just no point of view whatsoever, on the part of Americans Elect? I mean, just the fact that you're staying within the two major parties, having a Republican and a Democrat on the ticket, says something about where you are in the mainstream of American politics, right?

To which, Levine gamely responded:

You know, our only methodology that's different about Americans Elect is that the outcome cannot be aligned. That's the only thing about Americans Elect that is in any way, shape or form an "agenda," so to speak — that you can't pick the same ideology as your running mate. But which one you are, we don't care. It's completely using the American people to decide the outcome — and, at that point, the American people are gonna decide on the bipartisan spirit of the outcome and whether it meets the goal of the whole thought process.

But there can be no serious doubt that, unless you are Michael Bloomberg — who, in any case, is an "independent" in name only (yes, IINO) — or, perhaps, one of a tiny handful of other self-styled independents who conform to the Americans Elect "type," there is room at the Americans Elect table for two registrations only: Republican and Democrat.

Americans Elect COO Elliot Ackerman told Chuck Todd that those who have registered at AmericansElect.org are "very interested in the idea that they could have a voice that doesn't have to modulate between the two major parties."

But that is exactly what Americans Elect is positioning itself to do, is it not?

This project is not about creating access for independent and "minor" party candidates. And it's not about challenging the power of the so-called "major" parties,
as represented by the Democrats and the Republicans.

It is about shoring up the power of certain kinds of Democrats and Republicans.

Americans Elect: A Duopoly Joint.

The Shadow Super PAC of "Centrism"

Or, How Americans Elect Is Trying to Have Its Cake and Eat It Too

 

The other day, in the course of discussing the dogged refusal of Americans Elect to disclose the names of its financial backers, I wondered:

How is it that Lawrence Lessig, one of the
most informed and eloquent critics of the undue influence of money over politics — and one of the most ardent and public advocates for financial transparency from elected officials, corporations and political institutions — winds up on the Board of Advisors (see "Leadership," here) of a political group with such a shadowy financial pedigree?

Shortly afterwards, the respected election law scholar and blogger Rick Hasen tweeted Lessig a version of my question — "Do you still support Americans Elect, given their transparency problem?" — and this triggered a lively exchange, which is recorded on their two blogs: Lessig's initial response, Hasen's counter and Lessig's final volley.

In the second of his two posts, Lessig offers this crisp little summary of his argument (emphases Lessig's):

AE is a platform. It will give one candidate a chance to get on 50 ballots, and challenge the Democratic and Republican nominee.

What will that candidate owe AE? Gratitude, no doubt. But is there anything in that gratitude that should lead anyone to worry that the candidate will bend one way or the other because of these secret funders?

How could it? If the candidates don’t even know who the funders are (and I can attest with certainty that [declared Americans Elect presidential candidate Buddy] Roemer (who also is critical of the nontransparency) doesn’t), how is the position of the funder supposed to affect the candidate and his or her positions?

Lessig's position seems to be that, although it might be preferable for Americans Elect to reveal who its funders are...

1
The anonymity of Americans Elect's funders is not a serious concern, because all they are funding is (a) the creation of an online voting platform and (b) 50-state ballot access — not specific candidates.

2
The anonymity of these funders is not an issue, anyway, because, unless both a specific candidate and a specific funder(s) are known to one another, there is no opportunity for political corruption to occur.

In taking this line, Lessig echoes and amplifies the message that one hears from Americans Elect officials like CEO Kahlil Byrd and COO Elliot Ackerman, as well as from Lessig's fellow advisory board member at Americans Elect, Mark McKinnon: that Americans Elect simply (a) is an alternative mechanism for getting on the ballot, and (b) is not backing any particular single candidate — and thus is in compliance with its IRS corporate status as a 501c4 "social welfare organization."

This message is at odds, however, with the one being promoted by another organization that has Lessig as an advisory board member: the Sunlight Foundation, which, in its reports and news updates (here, here and here, under "Campaign Finance"), has been tracking a petition by two watchdog groups, Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center, calling on the IRS to tighten its regulation of 501c4's and, specifically, to investigate
four of these groups, including Americans Elect, for non-compliance.

In one such report, "Dark money in the twilight of 2011," Sunlight flags a recent item by Rick Hasen, in which he writes (emphasis mine):

My big concern [until quite recently] was
that we would see a lot of transfers of money from 501c4s to affiliated super PACs to shield the identity of donors to super PACs....[T]he reason these transfers are not taking place is that it appears the 501c4s are engaging in much more direct election-related activity than they have in the past. That is, we are seeing some 501c4s becoming pure election vehicles. The relation of 501c4s to super PACs is now like the past relation between 527s and PACs — these are now the vehicles of questionable legality to influence elections....[F]ixing the coordination rules for super PACs...seems to
be fighting yesterday’s war already. The key
is to stop 501c4s from becoming shadow
super PACs. Yes, campaign finance reform community, it has become this bad: I want more super PACs, because the 501c4 alternative is worse!

In fact, what the Americans Elect funders are funding
is considerably more than just an alternative voting platform and a ballot access initiative — two seemingly altruistic enterprises.

The political contours of this "more" reveal the inadequacy of Lessig's response to Hasen's query.

Indeed, that Lessig identifies himself only as a "supporter" of Americans Elect — never mentioning
that he actually is on the Board of Advisors — suggests that Lessig may be well aware of a certain cognitive dissonance in his having a simultaneous official role in two organizations, one of which, Americans Elect, is keeping in the shadows the very thing on which the other, the Sunlight Foundation, is trying to shine a light.

As we'll see, what Hasen called Americans Elect's "transparency problem" cuts in a few different
directions.

 

::   ::   ::

 

FOLLOWING Lessig's initial response to Hasen, Henry Farrell, who teaches political science and international affairs at George Washington University, posted
an insightful and nuanced challenge to Lessig
at Crooked Timber, the group blog where Farrell is
a contributor. This excerpt offers an opening to understanding the anti-democratic impulse at the
heart of Americans Elect (bold emphasis mine):

The problem that Lessig seems partly insensible to is that Americans Elect plausibly reflects a kind of purportedly non-partisan corruption that is more subtle but also more damaging than direct graft, or even the implicit quid-pro-quo relationships that he rightly excoriates. [University of British Columbia professor] Mark Warren gets at this nicely.

If corruption professionals look upon democracy
as an ambiguous force at best, one reason may
be found in our received conception of political corruption — the abuse of public office for private gain. ... This conception marginalizes the political dimensions of corruption — in particular, corruption of the processes of contestation through which common purposes, norms, rules are created; the institutional patterns that support and justify corruption; and the political cultures within which actions, institutions, and even speech might be judged corrupt.

...[T]he basic norm of democracy is empowered inclusion of those affected in collective decisions
and actions. ... In a democracy, meanings of political corruption gain their normative traction by reference to this basic and abstract norm of democracy. Political corruption in a democracy is a form of unjustifiable exclusion or disempowerment, marked by normative duplicity on the part of the corrupt. Corruption is marked not only by exclusion...but also by covertness and secrecy, even as inclusive norms are affirmed in public. Stated otherwise, the norm
of inclusion is not denied, but rather corrupted. Corruption within a democracy is thus a specific kind of disempowerment that I shall call duplicitous exclusion. Thus, in addition to the substantive harms often associated with corruption in democracies — inefficiencies, misdirected public funds, uneven enforcements of rights, etc. — we can think of corruption as damaging democratic processes.

Hasen’s critique suggests that Americans Elect is corrupt in just this sense. Even as it publicly affirms norms of inclusion, it provides a tiny and unaccountable group with a veto power that will be exercised to ensure that a ‘centrist’ candidate is chosen.

Lessig does seem to play up the traditional quid pro quo transaction — as though the most likely potential scenario for political corruption would be one in which
a specific funder (or funders) used Americans Elect to gain access to a specific candidate in order to extract (a) personal benefit(s). Of course, this is a straw man that Lessig easily knocks down, as soon as he points out that the donors are anonymous.

But, for some observers, it is not down at the granular, personal level of quid pro quo that the opportunity and the risk for corruption is most evident at Americans Elect. Rather, it is up at the systemic, process level — the level that, in order to see what's going on, requires a wider-angle lens that Lessig seems unwilling to use.

 

::   ::   ::

 

IT'S IMPORTANT to understand that Americans Elect has a formally stated policy of neutrality that — if its Board actually was to enforce the policy — would go a long way toward assuaging concerns that individual directors or advisory board members or, indeed, the Americans Elect corporation as a whole, were pushing specific candidates.

The problem is that the Board does not seem to enforce the policy. At all.

According to Americans Elect's By-Laws, both Directors (Section 4.12) and Officers (Section 6.1)

shall not communicate or act in favor of or
in opposition to any candidate for President
or Vice President at any time before the adjournment of the online nominating convention of Americans Elect.

In a much broader mandate that would seem to include members of the Board of Advisors and anyone else who holds a titled American Elect position, the corporation's Rules (Section 10.0) state:

Until the Americans Elect ticket has been selected by majority vote of participating Delegates in the Nominating Round of voting, Americans Elect shall be neutral with respect to all Candidates and shall not endorse, oppose, advance, or advocate any particular Candidate.

Note that no distinction is made between "draft" and "declared" candidates.

And, yet — for months — there has been a steady
stream of Americans Elect directors, advisory board members and other personnel playing what Hasen calls "kissy-face" with various dream candidates. This is just a sampling:

1

In Hasen's example, former New Jersey governor and Americans Elect director Christie Todd Whitman joins former Oklahoma governor and U.S. senator David Boren in a statement — sent out as an Americans Elect press release — praising outgoing U.S. senator Olympia Snowe and quoting Snowe's citation of the "vital need for the political center in order for our democracy to flourish."

2

Prior to this, Whitman went to the media at least seven times in favor of Jon Huntsman.

3

Courtesy of Lessig's Sunlight Foundation, we know that Americans Elect advisory board member Lynn Forester
de Rothschild held a thousand-dollar-a-head cocktail reception for Huntsman in January.

4

Also in January, a few weeks after Buddy Roemer declared his intention to seek the Americans Elect nomination, Americans Elect National Campus Director Nick Troiano staged (as in "stunt") a handful of Americans Elect promotional videos featuring Roemer.

5

Just a couple of weeks ago, the day after Roemer dropped his Republican bid and re-declared his Americans Elect candidacy, Lessig himself went on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" and outlined what he sees as
the need to "knit together these 'outsider' movements" calling for solutions on issues like the deficit and to address the "underlying [financial] corruption issue."

This triggered the following exchange with Joe Scarborough (video starting at 3:06):

Scarborough: Professor, do you agree with me that, of all the candidates that are out
there right now in 2012, Buddy Roemer fits this profile best — and actually, I believe, has the best message, pure message, for 2012?

Lessig: Absolutely! I've been with Buddy,
I had him at my house ... Absolutely! ... Absolutely! I don't believe in his policies, but
I believe in his reform, and I think — you're right — that he is the one candidate that
would have done something.

6

"Would have done something." As if to suggest that Roemer no longer was running. And yet, only a week later, Lessig was back on the Scarborough set, with Roemer himself (video). Watch this clip and tell me that both guests are not campaigning for Buddy Roemer:

 

 

7

Just this week, Lessig took his Roemer campaign to Twitter:

That afternoon, the Coffee Party — another group on whose advisory board Lessig serves — re-tweeted Lessig's call to its 12,000 Twitter followers, illustrating that none of this political activity by Americans Elect, its directors, advisory board members and other staff is happening in a vacuum.

There is, of course, the possibility that Lessig has his
own agenda for Americans Elect that doesn't jibe with
the No Labels-ish storyline this is being promoted by its founder, directors, and officers — a storyline that also, one assumes, was "bought" by its seed funders.

But it's not all clear how Lessig's reported desire to lead others in "occupying Americans Elect" for a specific "reform" candidate — and, indeed, going on MSNBC ("Morning Joe") twice in the last month to campaign
for, and with, Buddy Roemer — squares with Lessig's being an Americans Elect advisory board member who, according to Americans Elect's own Rules and By-Laws,
is bound by a strict neutrality policy that places what
he is doing, well...out of bounds.

8

A couple of weeks ago, Americans Elect advisory board member Mark McKinnon was on the panel for Jon Huntsman's much-discussed appearance on "Morning Joe." The newly disencumbered Huntsman, who had recently left the Republican race, made news by saying that "this duopoly is tired" and calling for "something to compete against the duopoly," "some sort of third-party movement," "some alternative voice out there."

McKinnon, for his part, was full of praise for Huntsman, saying (video starting at 7:38):

I love everything you’re saying, and I’ve always liked your politics, and I’m sorry you didn’t make it through the Republican primary, but I think you’ll — can provide real political leadership, whatever you do going forward.

When asked by Scarborough (starting at 11:09), "Can an independent be elected President in 2012?", McKinnon offered a more specific idea of what Huntsman's "real political leadership" might look like:

Just on a blind poll, even when people don't even know who the ticket would be, 25 percent of voters say they'd support [an independent ticket]....Put Jon Huntsman on that ticket, and you'd get up to 51 percent, I guarantee.

9

Last November, McKinnon shared the stage with Americans Elect CEO Kahlil Byrd, Washington Post national political correspondent Karen Tumulty and political consultant Tad Devine at a moderated Harvard forum that considered the viability of an Americans Elect ticket in 2012. At one point — video starting at 20:53 — the moderator asks McKinnon what "type" of candidate he thinks would step up to run under the Americans Elect banner. McKinnon — “just off the top of my head” (but then reading off a piece of paper, suggesting that the question is a set-up) — obliges with the following roster of nine:

Americans Elect director Christie Todd Whitman, Jon Huntsman, Chuck Hagel, Bob Kerrey, Condoleezza Rice, Tom Brokaw, Joe Lieberman, Evan Bayh, and John Chambers.

He reads the prepared list, with the barely disguised delight of a child naughtily but irrepressibly telling a secret — leaving no doubt that, between the question and the answer, "would" has turned into "should."

 

 

10

And then there's this slide from the Americans Elect presentation that Nick Troiano put together in January

offering these 49 names (originally 50, including
Steve Jobs):

Does this list look random to you? Sure, there are a
few token "liberals" here. But the main point of the list seems to be to illustrate what Americans Elect sees as the tolerable limits of "left" and "right."

And, with few exceptions, everybody here — which includes most of those already mentioned, as well as former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker, who, right after being promoted by original Americans Elect champion of "radical centrism" Thomas Friedman as "a third voice for 2012," got his own kissy press release from Americans Elect — falls safely and uniformly with range defined by "conservative Democrat," all the way over on the center, and "moderate Republican," all the way over on the center right.

Which is not surprising, really, given CEO Kahlil Byrd's remark, at the Harvard forum, that "America is a center-right country" — a comment that Byrd rendered blithely, as if to be voicing something that was so obvious that only a fool would try to dispute it.

But who created this list? Certainly, it wasn't National Campus Director Nick Troiano, who just graduated from Georgetown last year.

More likely, it was the same people who created the list of 70-plus people — the list above, plus another 20 or so? — that, according to Byrd, Americans Elect has been trying to sell on the idea of running on an Americans Elect ticket.

Is this Americans Elect wish list being curated by some, or all, of the corporation's "Leadership"? Certainly.

Are some, or all, of the group's financial backers on
this Leadership list? Surely.

Are these backers also part of this recruiting effort — including deciding whom is to be recruited? Very likely.

Which specific backers are helping with recruiting decisions? Are the recruiting suggestions of these backers being weighted, either explicitly or implicitly, depending on the levels of their contributions? These things, we don't know.

But this much is certain: None of these promotional activities, on the part of Americans Elect directors, advisors and other personnel qualify as "neutral,"
under the Rules and By-Laws of Americans Elect.

And Americans Elect is doing a lot more than just building a voting platform and creating ballot access.

 

::   ::    ::

 

ADDING to the dynamic that makes Americans Elect's agenda — or, to be more accurate, its owning of its agenda — as dark as its money, some official leaders of Americans Elect are in the habit of promoting Americans Elect and even promoting specific candidates, in the media and in other public settings, without disclosing their formal ties to the organization.

As we've seen, Lawrence Lessig never mentioned,
in his posts defending Americans Elect's financial non-disclosure practices, that he is on the group's Board of Advisors. Nor did he mention it in his appearances on "Morning Joe," when he was promoting Americans Elect declared candidate Buddy Roemer. Nor, for that matter, did either of the hosts or any of the panelists mention it. Nor was he provided with an onscreen caption that connected him in any way with Americans Elect. In fact, although Roemer made a cryptic reference to a "unity ticket," Americans Elect wasn't mentioned at all, in
either of these segments — which is odd, given that
they took place in the immediate wake of Roemer's having dropped his Republican bid and re-declared his Americans Elect candidacy.

Ditto, Americans Elect advisory board member Mark McKinnon, who — in addition to his Harvard appearance — has been a ubiquitous presence on NBC political news programs where Americans Elect has been the main topic; where Americans Elect or potential Americans Elect candidates have been analyzed and discussed; or where McKinnon has introduced and promoted Americans Elect in the context of another discussion. Over the last six months, McKinnon has appeared on such programs or program segments hosted by David Gregory, Andrea Mitchell, Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinki, Dylan Ratigan and Chuck Todd.

In some cases, actually, he appears alongside Americans Elect COO Elliot Ackerman. But — as you can see here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here — in no case does McKinnon ever self-identify as being what he is: on the official Americans Elect team. The hosts, for their part, identify McKinnon only as a "political analyst" or "political strategist" or as a co-founder of No Labels.

As Jim Cook of Irregular Times points out (with linked reference to similar examples involving Americans Elect advisory board member and Michael Bloomberg pollster Douglas Schoen):

This is part of a pattern of Americans Elect corporate leaders going on TV and promoting their Americans Elect political brand under the neutral guise of “expert” without disclosing their leadership positions within Americans Elect.

A person hawking a product on a television news show should disclose (or have disclosed for them) their affiliation with the corporation selling the product. A person who will not disclose their affiliation is being unethical.
A news show that does not disclose such affiliations when they are public is not doing its job. A corporation that sends its leaders to sell a political solution in disguise has not earned your trust.

Transparency? Hell, even the Americans Elect FAQs are buried as two 3-month-old posts — here and here — on the Web site's unsearchable News feed.

 

::   ::   ::

 

A COUPLE of weeks ago, Kahlil Byrd, speaking at
a panel discussion at New York University, cited the super PAC as one aspect of the two-party system that dramatizes the need for the kind of presidential ticket that Americans Elect is trying to produce. He was quoted as saying that:

the super PAC...seems like such an enormous thing. But it's 15 or 20 guys — and women — who are giving a lot of money and tilting campaigns one way or the other.

OK. But — given this and this and this and this and this — how is Americans Elect substantially any different, in political terms?

Of course, even in political terms, Americans Elect doesn't look exactly how we expect a super PAC to look. Which is the point of the term "shadow super PAC."

There is one snippet of Americans Elect messaging
that, when placed alongside everything else, seems
to reveal — perhaps with unintended candor — what Americans Elect really is about and why it's a problem.

The citation, above, about Americans Elect director Christie Todd Whitman's habit of promoting Jon Huntsman, highlighted Whitman's December 2011 interview with Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Joelle Farrell. Here's the relevant exchange (emphasis mine):

Farrell: You've said you like former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman. Do you think he could be the Americans Elect nominee?

Whitman: To me, he's the type of candidate that would appeal to them.

That's the same word, remember, that Americans Elect advisory board member Mark McKinnon had used at Harvard, a month earlier. I suggested that this particular moment, between McKinnon and the moderator — which provided McKinnon with an opportunity to read his list of nine favorites — seems a little staged (starting at 20:53; emphasis mine):

Moderator: Who's gonna be — who's the type of candidate? Mark mentioned all the great — all these great Americans who could be great presidents, or who certainly think in their own minds they could be great presidents. Who are the types of people you think might step up and actually put their name forward, or to have their name put forward at this nominating convention?....

McKinnon: Uh — sure — well — just off the top of my head, I'll tell you the types of people? —

Moderator: Yeah, types, I'm not gonna ask for specifics —

Of course, McKinnon plunges right into nine specifics. And notice how handy he is with that list.

Notice, too, that Americans Elect CEO Kahlil Byrd, who is sitting next to McKinnon on the stage, doesn't challenge McKinnon's riff. To the contrary, he seems to join in the chuckle over the reaction to someone's (his own or Tad Devine's) reaction that "those are good people."

But why is any Americans Elect director or advisory board member talking about what "type" of candidate would — or should — make a "love connection" with Americans Elect? After all, Americans Elect is just creating a voting platform and a ballot line. Right,
Kahlil? Right, Eliott? Christie? Mark? Larry? Right?!!

One well-placed writer cracked that, with his remarks
on "Morning Joe," Jon Huntsman was sending a
"Bat Signal" to Americans Elect.

Of course, as we've seen, Americans Elect has for months been sending Bat Signals to Jon Huntsman and others in Huntsman's "fiscally conservative, socially and culturally moderate" mold. And, just as the original Bat Signal always was revealed against the backdrop of a cloud, the constant, drip-drip pulse of statements and lists with which Americans Elect — through its directors, advisory board members, and staff, as well as through its own corporate news channel — has promoted specific candidates now has created a political tag cloud that reveals a highly specific ideological image.

 

::   ::   ::

 

HOLD THAT thought, while you pay attention to this...

According to Section 8.0 of the corporate Rules of Americans Elect (emphases mine):

The Presidential and Vice Presidential ticket nominated by Americans Elect shall...consist of persons of differing ideological perspective or positions on the Platform of Questions to result in a balanced coalition ticket responsive to the vast majority of citizens....Subject to reversal by majority vote of all registered Delegates, the Candidate Certification Committee shall determine whether any proposed ticket is balanced by reference to candidates’ responses to the Platform of Questions....

So what are the Platform of Questions and the
Candidate Certification Committees? According to
Section 5.1 of the corporate By-Laws, these both
are "Standing Committees of Americans Elect"; and, according to Sections 5.3.2 (Platform of Questions Committee) and 5.4.2 (Candidate Certification Committee) of the By-Laws, the members of both committees are "appointed by the Board," "serve
at the pleasure of the Board" and "may be removed without cause."

Let's take a walk in the weeds, shall we?

According to Section 5.3.1 of the By-Laws (emphases mine), the Platform of Questions Committee — which, remember, is "appointed by" and "serves at the pleasure of" the Board...

shall be responsible for developing
proposed questions for submission to the Delegates; polling the Delegates to determine which questions to include in the final Platform of Questions, as well as any amendments thereto; tendering the Platform of Questions
to all persons who are identified either as potential or drafted candidates for Americans Elect nomination...disseminating all responses by candidates or draftees to the Platform of Questions; ensuring that candidate and draftee answers to the Platform of Questions are responsive and seeking responsive answers thereto; and, subject to the direction of
the Board, development of supplemental Platform of Questions as national and world events may dictate.

According to Section 5.4.1 of the By-Laws,
the Candidate Certification Committee — also
a committee that is "appointed by" and that "serves
at the pleasure of" the Board (emphasis mine)...

shall be responsible for certifying that candidates and draftees for the offices
of President and Vice President meet all constitutional eligibility, as well as to develop and apply criteria of demonstrated achievements based on qualifications
of past Presidents and Vice Presidents,
to ensure that only persons capable of performing the duties of President and Vice President are eligible for voting by the registered Delegates, subject only to a majority vote to the contrary by all registered Delegates....

Still with me? OK. But what, exactly, is this "Platform of Questions"? According to Sections 2.1.3.1 and 2.1.3.2 of the Rules (emphases mine):

“Comprehensive Questions” shall mean
the detailed questionnaire posted on the
Website to be answered by Delegates that shall be considered by the Platform of Questions Committee in preparing the Platform of Questions...and “Platform of Questions” shall mean the Delegate-driven and Platform of Questions Committee-refined questions posed to and answered by all Delegates and Candidates to ensure informed decisions by Delegates and unambiguous positions by Candidates ... Development of [the] Platform of Questions shall be determined by the Platform of Questions Committee in accordance with the Americans Elect Bylaws after consideration of Delegates’ responses
to the Comprehensive Questions and may be supplemented from time to time before
the nominating round of voting.

Do you begin to see a picture emerge? Do you see how much latitude the Board and its Committees have and how little influence the non-Board and -Committee delegates are guaranteed? (Yes, I understand that there is language about how the Board's decision is "subject to reversal by majority vote of all registered Delegates." But the voter suppression on display in the recent test case of the Board's response to the first delegate challenge to one of its decisions — documented (in sequence) here, here and here — should disabuse anyone of the notion that this Board is going to "go gently into that good night.")

Look, again, at Section 8.0 of the Rules (emphases mine):

The Presidential and Vice Presidential ticket nominated by Americans Elect shall...consist of persons of differing ideological perspective or positions on the Platform of Questions to result in a balanced coalition ticket responsive to the vast majority of citizens....Subject to reversal by majority vote of all registered Delegates, the Candidate Certification Committee shall determine whether any proposed ticket is balanced by reference to candidates’ responses to the Platform of Questions....

Bearing in mind everything else — including the Bat Signals and the tag clouds — do you see how "balance" begins to look like code for "type"?

 

::   ::   ::

 

HERE'S the thing...

The same Americans Elect board that is refusing to enforce its own policy of neutrality — the same board that is permitting and enabling a specific "centrist" ideological profile to emerge in the public imagination as the Americans Elect "type" — also is the board that has determined that an ideologically "balanced" ticket is what is required, and that has empowered itself to decide what qualifies as "balance."

Lawrence Lessig wonders, in his two posts...

• "How is the secret money having any
  secret effect?"
• "How could the secrecy of the funders
  corrupt anything?"
• "How [are] secret donors...going to steer
  this wide platform of potential competitors
  one way or the other?"

Here are some questions in return:

Given the extraordinary power that the corporate board of Americans Elect has secured for itself in shaping the eventual Americans Elect ticket...

Given, too, Americans Elect's pattern of promoting only those candidates that answer to a specific ideological profile...

• Is it reasonable to believe that each of the 50 or
  so wealthy secret backers of Americans Elect who floated the corporation secret six- and seven-figure checks did so without having been provided assurances by Americans Elect that Americans Elect, for its part, would be stacking the deck for exactly the kind of "centrist" nominee and ticket that it's been promoting for all these months?
• What influence do these secret backers have in deciding who is on the Platform of Questions Committee, what the questions are, and how
  the questions are framed?
• What influence do these secret backers have in deciding who is on the Candidate Certification Committee, how "balance" is defined, and which nominee and ticket is certified as the most "balanced"?

And, especially given that Americans Elect, its directors, advisory board members and staff have whispered the actual names of people who, it would seem, all conform to an Americans Elect "type" of "fiscally conservative, socially and culturally moderate" candidate...

• Does the fact that Americans Elect seems so clearly to be working to ensure a specific type of nominee and ticket, rather than a specific one, really make the group any less "political," for
  IRS purposes?
• And does this fact that Americans Elect seems so clearly to be working to ensure a specific type of nominee and ticket, rather than a specific one, really make it any less a sign of political corruption, that Americans Elect presents itself
  to the public as a neutral model of openness
  and transparency, while acting in a contradictory fashion — and that Americans Elect pays for
  this exercise with tens of millions of dollars of money from funders that Americans Elect
  helps to keep secret?

Lessig wonders "how secret donors are going to
steer this wide platform of potential competitors
one way or the other." As I hope I've helped to demonstrate, here's how they already are doing it:

By funding a corporation and a process that
consistently enfranchises one specific type of
candidate (and supporters, including delegate
supporters, of such a candidate) — and that, in so
doing, consistently disenfranchises all other types
of candidate (and supporters, including delegate supporters, of such candidates).

If you are a potential candidate, or supporter of such
a candidate, who doesn't fit the American Elect profile, why bother participating, if you've been given reason
to believe that the fix already is in?

Even leaving the money out of it, what Americans
Elect is doing answers to the definition of the more insidious brand of political corruption that Henry Farrell
highlights — one in which, as Mark Warren writes, "the norm of inclusion is not denied, but rather corrupted." Take the secret money into account, and one also has the more obvious kind of corruption that Lessig has yet to acknowledge as a possibility.

So, one has to wonder: Exactly what kind of "social welfare" does Americans Elect have in mind?

Lessig talks a lot about quid pro quo, and my guess is that there is a quid pro quo going on at Americans Elect. But it's not the quid pro quo that Lessig rightly criticizes elsewhere in the political system — i.e., the one between a funder(s) and a specific candidate or elected official, in which the candidate or official is the one responsible for the "deliverable."

Rather, it's a quid pro quo between funders and a
specific organization. In this case, the corporate entity of Americans Elect is the one responsible for the deliverable — and the deliverable is a "centrist" nominee and ticket.

Of course, the contours of this new kind of quid pro quo are even more difficult to detect and trace than those of the old one — another reason why "shadow super PAC"
is such an apt term.

Meet the new boss. Just like the old boss — but with slicker PR.

Shadowy? To be sure. But hidden in plain sight.

Does Americans Elect Really Have 400,000+ Identity-Verified Delegates?

Delegate status: SSN, security check and verified ID required (click to enlarge)

Maybe closer to 30,000. See Update, below. —JL

Yesterday, Americans Elect was out with a press release that included the following claim (emphasis mine):

Americans Elect delegates, which now total more than 400,000 and counting, can draft and support a presidential candidate of their choice and nominate a presidential ticket that will appear on general election ballots nationwide this November.

Is this true? Does Americans Elect really have more
than 400,000 identity-verified delegates?

What evidence there is suggests that it possibly is
not even close to that number.

 

::   ::   ::

 

AS I LEARNED a couple of weeks ago, when I went
to AmericansElect.org and completed the delegate verification process, becoming an Americans Elect delegate requires a bit of a commitment. It's not as
simple as just "signing up."

Indeed, the corporate By-Laws of Americans Elect
specify two distinct levels of participation: Members
and Delegates. Section 2.2, defining "Members,"
states (emphasis mine):

All persons who are citizens of the United States may register online as Members
of Americans Elect...regardless of their membership in any political party. All Members who are registered voters
shall be eligible to become Delegates of Americans Elect upon verification of their lawful voter registration status by means of verification as determined by the Board. Members may participate in all activities of Americans Elect but shall not vote unless verified as Delegates.

Section 2.3 goes on to define "Delegates" as

Members who have submitted sufficient information to permit verification of their lawful status as registered voters and citizens of the United States, and who have been so verified by Americans Elect, and who have accepted the Delegate Pledge as provided by the Rules Committee.

As to the specifics of verification, the corporate Rules
of Americans Elect (Sections 1.0 and 1.1) detail that

[a]ny natural person who is a citizen of the United States, age 18 or older, registered to vote in any state or the District of Columbia
on the date he or she casts a vote in the Americans Elect Convention, and entitled
to vote in the election for President of the United States shall be qualified to be a voting Delegate of Americans Elect, upon submission of...[f]ull name as reflected on his or her voter registration; date of birth; residential address including street, apartment number if applicable, city or town, state, and zip code that matches the public voter registration address; and such additional publicly available information to verify status as a citizen and registered voter as Americans Elect may request.

 

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There are four basic steps to becoming an identity-verified delegate of Americans Elect, all of which
are to be completed via the verification interface
at AmericanElect.org.

The first two of these steps — providing a genuine
email address and choosing a "strong" PIN — echo the familiar registration process at many Web sites today, and would seem to correspond directly to the By-Laws' definition of Members as "persons who...register online."

Indeed, after completing these first two steps, Americans Elect provided me with my own "account" and a user number — 369310 —
which, you'll notice, is very close to the "400,000"
of the press release.

But in order to be eligible...

1
to provide clicks of "support" for
draft or declared candidates;

2
to draft candidates;

3
to actually to vote for candidates; and

4
to challenge decisions of the Board
and its committees

...one must become a delegate — which means completing the remaining two steps.

These steps involve providing one's full name, full residential address, date of birth, and last four digits
of one's Social Security number — then correctly answering several multiple-choice security questions
that are generated by this information.

Only then — when one's "identity" has been "verified" — is one a delegate, with all the privileges that obtain.

 

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HERE'S where it gets interesting.

If you go to AmericansElect.org, you'll see on the
home page a list of the "Most Supported" declared
and draft candidates.

The number beneath each candidate's name corresponds to what Americans Elect calls "support clicks." These clicks can be provided only by identity-verified delegates. If you click through to a specific candidate's page but are not logged in or are not a delegate, scrolling over the "Add My Support" button generates a pop-up that reads "You must be a delegate to perform this action."

If you drill down to the 20 or so "most supported" candidates — whether "declared" or "draft" — you'll
see that there has been a total of only about 16,000 clicks of "support" from delegates.

The thing is, the vast majority of "support clicks" are concentrated in this top tier. The "least supported" of this top tier of "most supported" candidates, David Walker, has about 150 clicks of "support." But, 25 or so candidates "down" the list, one already has arrived at candidates with around 50 or fewer "support clicks"; and 25 or so candidates later, the "support" for candidates has fallen to below 30 clicks. Out of 30-plus pages of draft candidates, each with 10 candidates, the last 24 pages of candidates have 25 or fewer "support clicks" each. The last 17 pages of candidates each have 5 or fewer clicks. And the last 10 pages are filled with candidates who have only 1 click of "support."

::   ::   ::

 

Obviously, a lot people (and their friends) are supporting themselves and their heroes. It probably is a stretch
to say that there are 20,000 clicks of "support" in the entire system. Which should worry Americans Elect, given that — according to its own corporate Rules — the qualifying threshold for any candidate's participating in the first stage of its primary is at least 10,000 clicks (1,000 clicks from each of 10 states).

So let's stay with "16,000." That number would correspond to 16,000 unique delegates, if each of
these delegates clicked "support" for only one candidate. But delegates are allowed to "support" as many different candidates as they like — so the total number of these delegates that have engaged so far probably is significantly less. If each of these active delegates clicked "support" for two different candidates, there would be 8,000 delegates engaging with the Americans Elect process. If each was giving a "support click" to three candidates, the total number
of engaged delegates would drop to a little more
than 5,000.

 

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BUT LET'S be generous. Let's assume that there are fully 16,000 Americans Elect delegates engaging with
the corporation's process.

Does this mean that Americans Elect has the 400,000 delegates that it claims — but that 384,000 of them are sitting on the sidelines right now?

Or does it mean that there are (at most) 16,000 active Americans Elect delegates (and maybe a few more inactive ones) — along with an additional 384,000-plus well-meaning citizens who went to the Americans Elect Web site and, with nothing more than an email address and a PIN number, registered as "members" but never got any further than that and never qualified as delegates?

I'm guessing the latter. But, either way, it appears
that Americans Elect is suffering from a very wide enthusiasm gap.

 

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UPDATE: 26 May 2012

Jim Cook of Irregular Times today flags a new article
in which Americans Elect national press secretary
Ileana Wachtel is reported to have said this week
that (emphasis mine)

only 300 out of tens of thousands of people had problems with the website that couldn’t be resolved, mostly because of inaccurate voter registration data.

Cook observes:

Only 300 out of “tens of thousands” had trouble registering as delegates? Tens of thousands? Counting generously, that means less than a hundred thousand people registered as delegates. If less than a hundred thousand people registered as delegates, that means Americans Elect inflated its delegate count in publicity materials by at least 400% — and most likely by more.

The true number of identity-verified Americans Elect delegates comes into even sharper focus, if you line up Wachtel’s “only 300 out of tens of thousands of people” with another mathematical clue attributed to Wachtel
and first reported on 9 May by Jonathan Tilove of the Times-Picayune (emphasis mine):

...Wachtel said that “less than 1 percent have tried and failed to register”....

Americans Elect CEO Kahlil Byrd had used this same number, in his response to a question about delegate verification that was asked of him during a Reddit forum on 6 March (emphasis mine):

Verification is going well, we're experiencing less than 1% of people having difficulty.

Here's the thing: If the total number of delegates
was the “more than 400,000” that Americans Elect
has been claiming since at least early March of this
year, then “less than 1 percent” would be a number
in the neighborhood of 4,000.

But 4,000 is nowhere close to 300.

If — as it seems reasonable to deduce — “only 300″ corresponds directly to “less than 1 percent,” then the total number of delegates is just north of 30,000.

This tracks well with the fact that there currently is
a total of only about 51,000 “support clicks” in the
entire Americans Elect online system and that delegates were permitted to click for as many candidates as they wished.

If the math I’m suggesting here is correct, then Americans Elect has exactly about three "tens of thousands" of delegates to its credit, meaning that —
as measured against its claims of "more than 400,000" delegates — Americans Elect has been inflating its delegate count by something like 1,333%.

The obvious caveat, of course, is that these calculations work, only if both of the numbers that Wachtel offers are accurate.

In any case: The verifiable estimate of the total number
of support clicks in the Americans Elect online system
is ~51,000.

The further the delegate count moves away from
51,000 and toward 0, the more believable — and, actually, better for Americans Elect — it seems, since
a lower count suggests a delegate pool that is small
but that is composed primarily of true believers who persevered to be verified and then all went on to click support for one or more candidates. (In theory, of course, this scenario also includes the possibility of a delegate pool of 30,000, to use the total suggested by Wachtel's numbers, but with less than half of these delegates doing all the clicking.)

As the delegate count moves in the opposite direction, approaching and surpassing 51,000, it would seem to
get less believable, since — especially if one assumes that some significant number of delegates did click for multiple candidates — higher counts suggest ever-higher numbers of people who went to all the trouble of getting verified and then couldn't be bothered to do anything with their empowered status.

If, in fact, the second scenario is as believable — or
even more so — than the first, well, that truly is a(nother) damning sign for Americans Elect.