Chlorophyll

(an email from Marc Reichardt)

A little bird told me that a few Greens with way too much time on
their hands were attempting to impugn my reputation yet again with
their so-called 'definitive evidence'. As Steve G. so courteously
compliments my honesty in the screed below, let me demonstrate some of that honesty to you right now:

1. The message duplicated by Jody was a message sent to the national
CC list sometime in May or June of 2004. In other words, the so-called
'smoking gun' was sitting in plain sight for all to see for quite some
time. If this was supposedly the admission of a rigging job, it's a
pretty piss-poor attempt to make it on a conspiracy list, I think.
Those usually have to be at least mildly covert. This was anything but
that.

2. Personally, I WANTED to use IRV, even after the discussion arose
about the possibility that people would be so committed to a single
candidate that they would default to 'no nominee' after that. That
discussion came up because of various committee members' wariness of allowing the minority in the party that wanted to stay out of the
Democrats' path (i.e. the original 'no nominee' group) to win out
because of splintering among other factions. In other words, the
discussion came up because people wanted to avoid exactly what they're
currently being blamed for (Funny how these political things work,
isn't it? One day, Saddam Hussein's your best sonofabitch in the
Middle East. The next day, you're tossing him a daisy cutter...)

However, I felt that IRV would still work out, and that the majority
were determined to pick a candidate, no matter who that might be. As
with so many discussions on the PCSC, I was outvoted and the rules
were set to extrapolate further than IRV would normally go (not to
mention the fact that it's something of a sterile process to get all
geared up for a national convention and then have it reduced to vote
counting behind the curtain that's over inside of a half an hour.)
What we arrived at, although favoring the position of 'no nominee' in
my opinion, was much more of a- dare I say it? -organic process.

Something else to keep in mind is that these rules were written while
the possibility for Nader to become an actual candidate was still wide
open. HE rejected US. We created the extra process of 'endorsement' in
order to be as inclusive of all factions as possible, but most
pointedly for the Nader supporters. Once again, we wrote rules to
select a candidate. Period. And the rules were designed to do just
that and ensure that we had a candidate, no matter who it was, in the
race for President.

3. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why some of you would
still be pursuing this utter waste of time and energy a year later.
There are so many better ways to be building the party and educating
people to our message but you somehow see fit to waste resources in
the pursuit of the 'enemies within' in true, McCarthyite fashion. You
people aren't interested in genuine social change. You're just
interested in winning a facile argument and getting the 'bad guy',
whether it's Monsanto, the Pentagon, or other Greens who happened to
have been involved in a group decision (you know, the one that was
approved by a super-majority of the CC?) that you didn't like the
outcome of. Grow up. Do something useful. At this point, you people
pursuing this look like the proverbial cinderblocks around the neck of
the party and the water's rising fast.

M

> If you are on other Green listservs, please distribute immediately and
> widely. Steve Greenfield from New Paltz NY posted it. It contains
> definitive evidence of the rigging of the GP presidential nomination
> process and convention.......LS)
>
> The following is information of utmost importance to GDI, and in my opinion
> supersedes all discussion we are currently holding. Please repost this
> message to Green Party members and Green Party listserves where interested
> persons will read it.
>
> The following was posted to the CC Discussion list today by national
> co-chair Jody Haug. It was a verbatim copy of an archived post authored by
> Marc Reichert of Michigan, former CC delegate from Michigan and member of
> the convention rules committee. She was posting it to answer a question from
> another CC member about why IRV wasn't used in the convention, and within it
> is contained a full description of the reasoning the rules committee used to
> reject IRV. It is clear from Marc's statement that the decision was
> influenced largely by outcome projections. The relevant portion of Jody's
> post is followed by the comments I sent back to the CC list.
>
> This is an extremely serious matter. There have been numerous accusations of
> rigging, but I have steered clear of this discussion because the evidence
> has been deductive and circumstantial, and nothing could be substantiated.
> Until now.
>
> We need a broadly cosponsored resolution to place before the CC calling for
> a public investigation. I believe that the resolution should also call for
> the immediate cessation of participation with both the Nominating Process
> Working Group and the Strategy Group by any members of the '04 PCSC and
> anyone involved in the discussion and drafting of the '04 convention rules
> pending the outcome of this investigation. We also need as many states and
> locals as possible to independently pass resolutions calling for this
> investigation. I call upon all local, county, and state committee members in
> GDI to consider this as a matter of highest and time-sensitive priority, and
> to correspond with your local, county, and State Committees regarding like
> actions.
>
> I also ask you to contact your own state's CC reps immediately urging swift
> action on this matter. I will post the list of contacts in a separate
> e-mail.
>
> Steve Greenfield
>
> > From: "Jody Grage Haug"
> > Subject: Re: [usgp-dx] RE: CC votes
>
> Quoting Marc Reichert:
> >
> "The PCSC discussed using IRV for a considerable amount of time and we were
> sorely tempted to go back to it at one point during the development process.
> However, our task was to write rules for a nomination process and we were
> concerned that IRV encouraged 'defaulting', as it were. In other words, we
> felt that with 'no nominee' as a prevailing option, so many people might be
> glued to a single candidate and simply choose 'no nominee' as their second
> and only other choice, that IRV would actually favor 'no nominee' over any
> of the candidates."
>
> This is outrageous. This requires a full and public investigation.
>
> This was not the PCSC's choice to make. If that's what the delegates were
> going to choose as their second choice, it was their democratic right to do
> so. Stating this in black and white substantiates that the people designing
> the rules fixed the election. You are stating flat out that you were making
> a judgment about a result that using IRV would create, and that you
> considered that result to be undesirable and therefore abandoned a central
> element of our platform and designed rules to prevent it. It's honest that
> Marc states this so clearly, but it is also an admission of rigging.
>
> You can expect text for a resolution on an investigaion promptly. This is a
> smoking gun.
>
> Steve Greenfield
> New Paltz, NY
>
> Lorna Salzman
> xxx-xxx-xxxx (or xxx-xxx-xxxx)
> lsalzman@....
>
> "To me the question of the environment is more ominous than that of peace
> and war....I'm more worried about global warming than I am of any major
> military conflict". (Hans Blix, chief UN weapons inspector, March 2003).
>
> "We are already fighting World War III and I am sorry to say we are
> winning. It is the war against the earth" (Raymond Dasmann)
>
>