On June 3, the voters of the 5th Supervisorial District of Mendocino County re-elected Dan Hamburg to the Board of Supervisors, for a second continuous term. He is a registered Green and was the Green Party’s nominee for Governor of California in 1998. County Supervisor is a non-partisan office in California. Hamburg was unopposed for re-election to the Board. The 5th district includes the southwest corner of the county.
I’d like to thank all those who participated in the all party and independents “Coalition of Seven”; ten candidates (of the 45) for California State office who expressed interest in working as a team under pure proportional representation (PR).
While many around us were complaining and crying about the voting system that the voters in California had approved and elected several years ago, they were ignoring the principles of teamwork and unity, gave no respect to us at the 6th California Super-state Parliament:
http://www.usparliament.org/ss11.php
But our team hit the ground running when the gates opened for the primary during April and May. We hit the beach as a coordinated team with a large center, and left and right wings.
During the past two months we continually spoke about unity and of the importance of working across party lines to consider and adopt solutions for the good of the all, while our friends in the news media ignored the unifying psychological message we bestowed.
We worked diligently to build an organization among rookies in a matter of days, elected consecutively ranked members of the team and a unity platform. Each of those ten contributed innovative ideas which transformed our potential to new heights.
No candidates complained as they embraced the unifying process of ranked choice voting as a seven-member sate-wide district even though it was entirely new to them.
We knew that we had an equal chance as all others and that we were poised for success because unity in politics is a new phenomena that everyone loves.
But we weren’t united enough, too many of our allies were scatter-shooting and they weren’t coordinating and focused with our message when it mattered the most. We failed to establish the comradeship, we never gained the confidence from our friends that we needed for success so we have only ourselves to blame.
We’re now practicing everyday to improve. The good news is that we’ve established more and more tradition for future team players on which to build.
In in the age of the internet people are able to gather information in a matter of milliseconds so what used to take centuries may now take only years.