[Pnp-wg] population based proposal

[Greg Gerritt]

A proposal for allocation of delegates to state parties for the 2008 Green
Party Presidential Nominating  convention.

The Green Party convention shall be made up of delegations from the various
state parties with each state party allocated one delegate for each 250,000
people, 4 delegates for each 1 million people, that live in the various
states.  This would provide for a convention of approximately 1200 delegates
with delegation sizes ranging from  2 to approximately 140.

Explanation:

A convention should be made up of delegations in which each delegate
represents approximately the same number of people back home.   The problem
for the Green Party is to decide what to measure as the various state laws
and the various state political cultures mean that actual measures of Greens
in each state have different meanings and are really not comparable.    Even
when comparing state parties in which the ballot access and registration
laws are similar, subtle differences often lead the parties in the different
states to have very different ways of recognizing membership.

Given that the Green Party of the United States is a federation of State
Green Parties and is required to treat then all fairly, it is incumbent upon
us to find measures that are strictly comparable across all states and
ballot access laws.  Within the realm of politics there is no measure that
is truly comparable across 51 state lines.

Noting the lack of strict comparability it still makes sense to look for
markers that measure the relative size of Green Parties.  One measure that
seems more comparable across state lines than most others is the percentage
of the vote that Green candiates receive on Election Day.  A study of the
Elections and Candidates data base on the GPUS website reveals an
interesting regularity.  From Maine to Hawaii, Alaska to Florida, Green
candidates generally do about the same at the ballot box.  There is a great
deal of variability to be sure, but there are no states in which Green
candidates do exceptionally better than they do in other states.  The only
trend  I could discern, and that barely, was that in small population states
Green candidates tended to have somewhat higher percentage of the vote than
Green candiates running for the same office in a race with the same number
of candidates in large population states.

In other words the percentage of the Green vote does not vary all that much
from state to state This trend of regularity across state lines does not
extend not any other political measure, primarily because those other
measures are so tied into state election laws and the political culture of
the states.  

If simplicity is good, then noticing that Green votes are pretty much the
same everywhere and that no other measures are strictly comparable gives us
a starting point. In addition if we do not wish to punish state parties
because they happen to be in states with more restrictive laws, it makes
sense to use one very easily available number to determine the size of Green
delegations to a nominating convention, Population.

The argument for a convention of 1200 delegates has several key provisions.
One is that in creating a fully proportional convention it allows for even
the smallest state to send at least 2 delegates, which allows us to demand
diversity in a way that if states send smaller delegations it is harder to
achieve.  A second provision is that a larger convention gives more people
the opportunity to participate and bring that experience home.  The Green
Party should be striving to have the largest convention that it can pull
together.  It should be a stretch, and it most definitely should be bigger
than the previous one until the green party eventually reaches a saturation
point in the universe.  It is money well spent.  State parties can start
preparing now if they can easily predict what their delegations will be 4
years hence, and a population determined delegation gives them the simplest
way to determine it.

Chart.  only a partial chart.


CA  35 million people  140 delegates
TX  22 million people  88 delegates
NY 19 million people   76 delegates
PA  12 million people  48 delegates
MI  10 million people  40 delegates
MA  6 million people   24 delegates
KY  4.1 million people  16 delegates
OK 3.5 million people  14 delegates
ME 1.3 million people  5 delegates
RI  1.1 million people  4 delegates
SD .76 million people  3 delegates
WY  .5 million people   2 delegates




  


--- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts ---
multipart/alternative
  text/plain (text body -- kept)
  text/html
---