The Green Party national committee has voted down a plan to revise the formula of how many national committeemembers each state should have. The plan, written by a special committee to wrestle with that issue, can be seen here. It is somewhat complicated, and tries to amalgamate data on rank-and-file membership, how many Green Party members hold elective office in that state, how many votes the party polled in that state for all partisan office, and how well the party’s presidential candidate did.
I tried to read the DAC Proposal, but got lost halfway through. Why is it so bloody complicated? And why must the states jump through multiple mathematical hoops when Uncle Sam has already invested so much time, talent and tax revenue mapping the U.S. population and assigning congressional districts accordingly? Why not caucus one GPUS delegate from each congressional district?
The reason for not just using Census data is that the Greens are not evenly spread thru the population. However you can’t go strictly off of voter registration data, because only about 20 states have voter registration by party.
Example: Maine has more GP activity than Texas which has 10x larger population. Mainers know they’ve got about 20,000 GP members, becuase the state keeps track of it for them. GPTx officials don’t have a clue not is there no registration by party there, but the voters are spread out over a quarter million square miles.
In all fairness, which party should get more representation on the national committee?
This complicated proposal was an attempt to figure that out.
There are other considerations at play as well, some ironically paralleling the small-state/large-state problems that the Founders had to wrestle with, and that led to the Electoral College among other things. I’m confident, tho, that we’ll work out something that neither locks out the less populous nor disenfranchises the big guys… and that is compehensible to boot!
/ /skip
Skip Mendler
GPNC delegate from PA