On April 26, 2022, Peter Ackerman died unexpectedly at 75. He was very wealthy and used some of his wealth to found Americans Elect in 2010. It was to be a centrist political party intended to run a presidential candidate in 2012. Because the group didn’t know the identity of its future presidential candidate, Ackerman funded petition drives to put the party on the ballot, in almost all of the states that don’t require a group to have chosen its nominee in advance of petitioning for ballot access.
Americans Elect qualified as a party in 29 states and then held an on-line presidential primary. Any registered voter in the U.S. was free to participate in that primary, if the individual was a registered voter and signed up with Americans Elect. The party rules required the winner to obtain a particular number of votes, and no one who entered the presidential primary received enough votes to qualify. So, Americans Elect did not run anyone for president in 2012, and mostly vanished from state ballots.
Ackerman also funded the lawsuit Level the Playing Field v Federal Election Commission, hoping to force the FEC to stop the Commission on Presidential Debates from taking corporate money to sponsor debates that were discriminatory. He also helped fund the initiative in Maine to use ranked choice voting. And he was active in fighting authoritarianism around the world. See these tributes. Thanks to Chad Peace for this news.
