[A tip of the pen to Bill Busa for alerting me to the change in bylaws.]
Disenfranchisement. Oligarchy. Plutocracy. These are now the official principles of Americans Elect.
Americans Elect is a 501c4 corporation funded by Wall Street hedge fund executives that is trying to run its own online privatized presidential nomination in 2012. Until now the Americans Elect corporate board has paid lip service to the idea of democracy within the Americans Elect process. That changed today. With the publication of new bylaws, Americans Elect has taken the vote away from its delegates and placed ballot access in the hands of an unelected, untouchable corporate board.
The Candidate Certification Committee
In the Americans Elect system described by the bylaws, an American citizen is supposed to be able to make a choice — but only between alternatives that the Americans Elect corporation deems acceptable. The self-appointed Americans Elect corporate Board of Directors is to appoint a Candidate Certification Committee, which serves at the corporate board’s pleasure, can be reshuffled at the corporate board’s will, and is empowered to reject candidates that it does not consider suitable. Certification doesn’t sound so bad, but it has a complement: decertification, exclusion, ejection. This is a Candidate Ejection Committee.
This committee, appointed by the Americans Elect Board of Directors (which in turn is only appointed by itself), will decide whether presidential aspirants may have the privilege of ballot access or not.
The previous version of the Official Corporate Bylaws of Americans Elect had this to say about the power of the corporate-appointed Candidate Certification Committee and the power of delegates to overturn its decisions:
Section 5.6. Committee Override by Delegate Vote. Any decision of the Platform of Questions Committee or the Candidate Certification Committee shall be nullified by a majority vote of all registered Delegates, except that a maximum of three candidates for President and three candidates for Vice President may be placed on the ballot by Delegate nullification.
The new version of the Official Corporate Bylaws of Americans Elect posted today has this to say about the power of the corporate-appointed Candidate Certification Committee and the power of delegates to overturn its decisions:
Section 5.6. Committee Override by Delegate Vote. Any decision of the Platform of Questions Committee or the Candidate Certification Committee shall be nullified by a majority vote of all registered Delegates, except that a maximum of three declared candidates for President and three declared candidates for Vice President may be placed on the ballot by Delegate nullification, and except that only a non-unanimous vote of the Candidate Certification Committee regarding contingently qualified candidates may be subject to reversal vote by the Delegates.
There is no record anywhere of any non-unanimous decision made by any committee of Americans Elect. This should not be surprising, considering that every member of every committee of Americans Elect has been appointed directly by just one man, Peter Ackerman, or appointed by Ackerman’s appointees.
Disenfranchisement. Oligarchy. Plutocracy. These are now the official, codified principles of Americans Elect.
Exercising my nominal powers as a delegate, I will be filing a formal petition tonight, moving to reverse this decision. But unless Americans Elect changes its ways, it will repeat the suppression tactics of its first vote, refuse to tell delegates that the petition even exists, stick the petition on a page hidden under three levels of links, wait for these uninformed delegates to not vote on the petition in a very short window of 72 hours, then delete all record of the petition from its website.
With every passing day, Americans Elect looks less and less like a democratic process. More and more, it resembles the Vogon fleet.
