Republicans helping Greens

[lpetrich]

How Republicans Are Trying to Use the Green Party to Their Advantage - The New York Times - "The G.O.P. has sought to help Green Party candidates in previous election cycles to siphon votes from Democrats. This year is no different — but it hasn’t always worked."

Four years ago, the Green Party candidate played a significant role in several crucial battleground states, drawing a vote total in three of them — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — that exceeded the margin between Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton.

This year, the Republican Party has been trying to use the Green Party to its advantage again, if not always successfully.

Noting efforts in WI, MT, and PA.

With Mr. Trump trailing Joseph R. Biden Jr. in most national and swing-state polls, Republicans are again trying to help third parties that may appeal to Democratic voters and siphon off votes from Mr. Biden. This is taking place alongside a broader pattern of disinformation and skepticism by the president and his allies that has sown confusion and undermined confidence in the election.

Like Kanye West.

Republican efforts to aid the Green Party are not new. In 2016, a billionaire backer of President Trump, Bernie Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot, provided support to Jill Stein, the Green candidate, according to people with knowledge of the strategy, who said the effort was done with the knowledge of some officials at the Trump campaign and its chairman at the time, Paul Manafort. (Mr. Manafort was subsequently convicted of eight counts in an unrelated financial fraud trial.)

...
There would seem to be little in common between the Green Party, with its mission to protect the environment, and the G.O.P., with its goals of eliminating environmental regulations. But distrust between the Green Party and Democrats goes back to Mr. Nader, and the role he may or may not have played in tilting the 2000 election in favor of George W. Bush. Mr. Nader won more than 97,000 votes in Florida in a race where less than 600 votes delivered the state to Mr. Bush.

Sometimes Republican aid is done without the Green Party’s knowledge, but sometimes it is overt. Carl Romanelli, the Green Party Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, acknowledged receiving financial support from Republicans to help him get on the ballot in 2006.

In 2010, Mr. Mooney helped organize a successful petition drive to get the Green Party on the ballot in the Texas race for governor, working with a Missouri-based nonprofit called Take Initiative America. Texas Democrats sued, and court documents revealed Take Initiative America received $532,500 in anonymous donations that they refused to reveal at the time.

But in fairness, the Green Party is sometimes not involved with the Republican Party.

Sometimes the Green Party itself is not only unaware of Republican efforts but has tried to restrain them. In 2009, the party filed a lawsuit in Florida to determine who had arranged for five unknown candidates to appear on the Green Party line.

Ronald G. Meyer, a Florida elections lawyer who handled the case for the party, said they found “that a Republican operative recruited a bunch of college-student-aged people, some waitresses and college kids, and paid their qualifying fees.”

Asked about ballot chicanery, Mr. Hawkins said, “These people plays these games, and they are just hacks for the two parties.”

He tried to distinguish his party, and its years of history and organizing, from Mr. West’s candidacy.

“I tweeted at some point that Kanye West is a Republican dirty trick,” he said. “If Roger Stone didn’t do it, he wished he did,” he added, referring to the longtime political adviser to Mr. Trump, and self-proclaimed master of dirty political tricks.

 

[lpetrich]

Why would the Republicans want to help seeming opposites, the Greens?

As spoiler candidates, to draw away votes from Democratic candidates and split the liberal vote.

I will now explain vote splitting and the spoiler effect. Imagine that you and 11 friends want to vote on a pizza topping, and that 5 of you are meat lovers and 7 are vegetarians. If they vote on sausage and green peppers, we get 5 for sausage and 7 for peppers, and peppers win. But let us introduce artichoke hearts. The vegetarians are split, so we may get a vote like 5 for sausage, 4 for peppers, and 3 for artichoke hearts. The winner is sausage. The minority-taste topping won because the majority's vote was split by the artichoke.

The problem is the way that a common voting system works. First-past-the-post or plurality voting means voting for only one candidate with whichever one getting the most votes wins. It's very simple, but also very dumb.

What can be done?

A simple solution is to have more than one election, with earlier ones winnowing down the candidates for later ones.

A common form is top-two runoff or two-round system. The top two candidates from the first election advance to the second election.

One can take it a bit further and advance all but the candidates with the fewest votes. One then repeats several times until one gets a winner. This is called the "exhaustive vote", and some organizations use it. It is impractical for elections for public office, for obvious reasons.

Partisan primary elections are a sort of two-round runoff system, it must be noted.

 

[lpetrich]

Instead of having separate elections, one can cast a vote for more than one candidate.

A simple approach is coequal choices, "approval voting". One might also give each candidate a different strength of vote: "range / rated / score voting". One then counts up the votes as in first-past-the-post.

An alternative is to rank one's candidates by order of one's preference: first, second, third, ... - sometimes called "ranked choice voting" or "preferential voting".

One can do a virtual top-two vote with that. In the first round, one selects out the top two top-preference candidates, then ignores all the others in the ballots for the second round. Thus, if one's first choice didn't make the top two, and a later vote did, then that vote will still count.

But a common approach is a virtual version of the exhaustive vote, often called "instant runoff voting". Each top-preference loser gets ignored in later rounds, and if one's top preference was a loser, then one's next preferences can still count.

A nice thing about IRV is that one can vote for one's favorite as one's top preference, and in one's next preferences, some fallback candidates. Like make #1 a Green and #2 a Democrat. So Greens and other alternative parties will not be spoilers.

 

[lpetrich]

Kanye West’s Presidential Run Is Serious, and It’s an Unmitigated Disaster for Democrats | by Jack Luna | Medium - "West has filed paperwork with the FEC and is already on the ballot in Oklahoma."

Why is Kanye West so dangerous to the Democrats?

• He’s Black.
• He’s critical of the Democrats.
• He’s a mega-millionaire with massive name recognition and a tremendous fan base.
• He can get media attention just for being himself.

Given these and other factors, Kanye threatens to upset the 2020 election thanks to the “spoiler effect,” an electoral quirk in which a candidate who can’t possibly win ends up splitting the vote and affecting the outcome of a race between other more realistic contenders.

Then discussing spoilers.

Like the Democrats defending MO-SEN incumbent Claire McCaskill by supporting kooky Republican Todd Akin against his R rivals in the primaries. He delivered with "legitimate rape". I think that he meant something like "real rape", but that flub stuck.

Like the D's supporting right-wing kook Roy Moore in the special election for AL-SEN in 2017. Roy Moore beat R party choice Luther Strange in the R primary, and then was defeated by D Doug Jones.

Like the R's supporting Ralph Nader and splitting the D vote in 2000, helping George Bush II into the Presidency.

Also claiming that the D's boosted outrageous candidates in the R primaries, candidates like Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson, to make D choice Hillary Clinton seem more palatable than the R's.

Yes indeed, this is the ugly truth most Democrats don’t want to hear or acknowledge — that the Trump presidency is partially a creation of Hillary Clinton and the Democrats because of their long-standing strategy of boosting extreme right-wing candidates during the primary phase of the election cycle.

And this is something for which actual evidence does, in fact, exist.

As revealed by Wikileaks, in an April 2015 email to the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the Clinton campaign identified Donald Trump as a “Pied Piper” candidate who could move the Republican field “further to the right” and stated, incredibly: “We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously.”

Did you get that?

The Clinton campaign told the DNC to actually start pumping Donald Trump in April 2015 — before he had even announced his candidacy. Not only did the Clinton campaign know that Donald Trump was running for president, they were already planning to foist him on the media as a serious candidate.

By moving the Republican candidate field further to the right in 2016, the Democrats hoped to capture the center. This turned out to be a terrible miscalculation and misreading of the American electorate. A bunch of other things went wrong, too, including the Russian attack on our country — one prong of which disclosed the email I cited above — and the last-minute leak of an FBI memo to Congress saying that the Clinton email investigation had been reopened.

Then about how Kanye West is a R-supported spoiler candidate.

 

[Terrell]

I wonder why the Dems don't try and split some of the right leaning/wing voters by sliding a little money to the Constitution Party. At least enough for them to air some ads in swing states. It might not work since the right has more political discipline than the left, but I think it's worth at least a try.

https://www.constitutionparty.com/assets/National-Platform-Full-Version.pdf