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Harry, I'm hoping we'll have a march in Fort Collins, so I'm intending to participate locally. Good luck with your Denver march.
Véronique, you also have some rather restrictive language regarding the ability of Longmont Greens to support candidates. Political parties do like to pressure their members to contribute money to and speak in favor of the party’s official candidates, at least in public. But in non-partisan races the political parties do not have official candidates, and in some races there will likely be difficulty recruiting Longmont Greens to run every time a seat is up for election. Maybe you won’t have a member who lives in the election district. Maybe you won’t have a member who is qualified for a specialty office like district attorney or coroner. So consider what your members will do if there is no member of the Longmont Greens in a particular race, for whatever unavoidable reason. Political parties sometimes specify that their members cannot publicly support another party’s candidate if the member’s party has a candidate in the race, but members are free to support the candidate of their choice if their own party has no official candidate. Even under the most exacting standards of fidelity, I don’t see it as a betrayal of the party to vote for a decent Dem or a qualified Repub when there is no Green running.
Véronique, part of the problem with the wording as it exists is the confusion over nominating candidates for races. In non-partisan races, the political party factor is not supposed to intrude. Candidates volunteer to run, and they collect signatures from local voters who thereby nominate the candidates to be listed on the ballot. The political parties are not the nominating entity. The political party to which a candidate belongs will not be indicated on the ballot by a letter after his/her name. Multiple candidates of the same political party may compete for the same office. There is no Democratic Party nominee, no Republican Party nominee, no Green Party nominee. There are only citizens who decide to run and who collect enough signatures from local voters to meet the requirement for being listed on the ballot. The statement in your by-laws that the Longmont Greens will nominate candidates for non-partisan races is therefore inaccurate. The Longmont Greens may very well encourage their members to run for office, and members of the Longmont Greens may very well sign nominating petitions that candidates carry around. But the Longmont Greens as a political party will not nominate any candidate for a non-partisan race.
Scott, the font size in your recent post is showing in my browser as 1.5, unreadably small. Maybe you could edit your post to increase the font size.
I second the idea of re-wording or removing. The statement leaves itself wide open to the interpretation that the Longmont Greens oppose certain kinds of prejudice and tolerate other kinds of prejudice.Also, while I applaud your determination to run candidates for office, I suggest that you add some clarifications to 3.2.3 and 7.4 regarding partisan versus non-partisan races. 3.2.3. "agree to support, promote and/or endorse only Green Party candidates nominatedby this local, the Green Party of Colorado or the Green Party of the United States"Does this wording prevent party members from supporting, promoting, or endorsingcandidates in non-partisan elections? Because the Longmont Greens will not be nominating any candidate in a non-partisan local race. Can party members support, promote, or endorse, forexample, a Dem if there is no Green candidate in the race? If it should happen that aGreen Party member is nominated by the Dems, are Longmont Greens forbidden to support,promote, or endorse that candidate? This item appears to elevate party labels abovepositions and policies. 7.4. "Voting members will be responsible for endorsing candidates who are running in elections for local nonpartisan office."Political parties are not supposed to endorse candidates in non-partisan races. If the party envisions endorsing non-members of the Green Party in non-partisan races that have no Green Party member running, why are individuals prevented from doing this?
This amendment would appear to codify what has been the practice in the past. I can find an explicit reference to the co-chair term in the minutes from the state meeting in 2007, which can be found at http://coloradogreenparty.org/about/history/gpco-2007-state-meeting-minutes/.The meeting was held June 23-24, 2007, in Carbondale, Colorado. On Saturday, June 23, after a decision to change the co-chair terms from two years (which they were at that time) to one year, the following is found in the meeting minutes.
11:15 a.m. Election of new state officers and national delegates and selection of webmaster and e-list manager Tom Kelly of the Arapahoe Greens and Dave Chandler of the Adams-Jefferson Greens volunteered to become co-chairs for the 07-08 term.Agreement seeking resulted in a consensus for Kelly and Chandler as state co-chairs for approximately one year, beginning June 23 and until the next annual state meeting.Dan Sage of the Arapahoe Greens volunteered to continue as state treasurer for the 07-09 term.Agreement seeking resulted in a consensus for Sage as treasurer for approximately two years, beginning June 23 and until the annual state meeting of 2009.Eric Fried of the Poudre Valley Greens volunteered to become state secretary for the 07-09 term.Agreement seeking resulted in a consensus for Fried as secretary for approximately two years, beginning June 23 and until the annual state meeting of 2009.
This is an explicit description of a one-year term being approximately one year from the date of the election to the date of the following year's meeting. It is also an explicit description of a two-year term being approximately two years from the date of the election to the date of the meeting two years hence. Although the co-chair terms were reduced from two years to one year, the other offices continued with two-year terms, so both the one-year term and the two-year term are described in the minutes. The description of the term length is repeated for each office, so it does not seem to be a typo.The 2008 meeting was held on May 3, so the nominal one-year term from the 2007 meeting (June 23) to the 2008 meeting (May 3) was approximately ten and a half months. The 2009 meeting was held in July by teleconference, no specific date available on the history page, so the nominal two-year term from the 2007 meeting (June 23) to the 2009 meeting (sometime in July) was several weeks longer than two years.
Thank you for pointing out a potential point of confusion. I did not intend the “five councilmembers” to refer to anything except the number of councilmembers who have signed on as co-sponsors. 3.5.3 does not specify any particular number of councilmembers (beyond one) who may submit a proposal to the facilitator for discussion. The wording "any councilmember" is structured to allow one (obviously the minimum number) councilmember to submit. I assume that two, three, four, five, or any number in addition to one would not invalidate the submission. In this case there are five co-sponsors. I do not intend any additional significance to the number.Item 1 is attached by a colon to proposals that are made to the state council directly, without the involvement of the facilitator. Proposals submitted to the facilitator are not conditioned upon item 1. Note the period at the end of the sentence describing submission to the facilitator, in constrast to the colon that connects the conditions to the pathway of direct presentation.
The material part is who can submit via what channel and whether there are conditions attached. There are no conditions attached to councilmembers submitting a proposal to the facilitator. The conditions are attached to appointed state representatives making a proposal directly to the state council.Five councilmembers have submitted a proposal to the facilitator for discussion. This is the channel that has no conditions attached.
Regarding paragraph 3.5.3 of the procedures,"3.5.3. The Council will discuss via email issues raised among its representatives or by any GreenParty member who participates. Any councilmember or Committee may submit a proposal to theconvener or facilitator for discussion. Appointed state representatives of local chapters will havethe ability to make proposals to the State Council directly under the following conditions:"There are two paths for submitting proposals. One path is to submit the proposal to the convener/facilitator. There are no conditions attached to this path. The other path is to submit the proposal to the State Council directly, and this path has conditions attached to it. Five councilmembers have submitted a proposal to the facilitator for discussion. Will the Colorado Green Party follow its own rules and put the proposal up for discussion?Judy HarringtonCo-Chair, Poudre Valley Green Party
Poudre Valley chapter results of discussion of Harry’s proposalLocation: three people against both the Carbondale and Frisco locations, two people neutral. I oppose these locations because they are likely to be snowy in the spring. I favor a May meeting, and even in May these locations can still have lots of snow. The other people who opposed these locations were concerned about the lack of a chapter there. They felt it would make organizing the meeting more difficult. The two people who were neutral said the lack of a chapter was not a serious problem, but they would prefer a town with an active chapter. We all like Grand Junction as a location. It is in the western part of the state and it has a new chapter.Co-hosting by chapters not based in the chosen city: none of us like this. People like to welcome others to their own city. It’s a boost for the chapter’s city. No enthusiasm for hosting out of town. Live-streaming/electronic voting: three people like live-streaming but not electronic voting, one person prefers to have people attend the meeting in person, one person likes both live-streaming and electronic voting. There was concern about verifying identity and about configuring the council forum to allow voting by regular party members who are not council members. There was some joking about how someone could select names of multiple party members who are not very active and are therefore unlikely to notice that their name is being used in the forum, could register as all of those selected names, and could cast multiple votes in elections of interest. I doubt that anyone would go to the trouble of writing programs to make multiple votes appear to be coming from various locations instead of coming all from the same machine. But I suppose someone might do it just to prove that the system is vulnerable.Date: one person prefers late August/early September so Andrea can finish her term, one person prefers May, one person likes a May meeting with a summer-long transition of elected officials so Andrea can finish her term, one person likes the late August/early September date this year so Andrea can finish her term but prefers switching to May in future years with a one-month transition period, one person likes both of the previous two suggestions.The two “transition” options are based on the belief that May is a better month for the meeting but it is unfair to cut short Andrea’s term and there is a way to satisfy both goals at the same time. The transition option that switches to the May date for future meetings envisions that whoever is elected this year will understand that the term of office will likely be a bit shorter than two years. Subsequent terms can be two years if the party is consistently able to organize a meeting in May. I prefer a May meeting because I believe (from reading old posts/minutes) that the purpose of switching to two-year terms was to get the co-chair cycle in sync with the two-year election cycle. After the presidential election or the mid-term election, the party can elect leaders and plan a two-year strategy toward the next election. Holding the meeting in the early spring after an election allows maximum time for carrying out the strategy. Delaying the party meeting reduces the time for implementation of the strategy. If the two purposes of the meeting are decoupled and the co-chair election occurs six months after the strategy meeting, there is a chance that new co-chairs will be saddled with a strategy prepared by previous co-chairs, or that new co-chairs will develop their own strategy with only one year to implement it, which negates the purpose of the two-year term.An additional reason for preferring a spring-ish meeting is that a fall-ish meeting interferes with campaigning for issues that appear on county-wide ballots in November of the “off” years. August/September is a poor time to be thinking about state party leadership changes and/or strategies when there are local issues that Greens might be trying to influence.Given all of this, I should prefer a meeting in February or March. But I don’t, because of the snow. People who can’t or won’t brave a snowy journey, and people like one of our members who drives a snow plow when there are storms, shouldn’t have to worry that their ability to participate will depend on the weather. A factor that would persuade me to consider February/March as a reasonable time for a meeting is the possibility of electronic voting. If we could get a secure system set up, a sudden snowstorm would not hinder party members state-wide from participating.On a more local note, electronic voting could occasionally make participation easier for us in Fort Collins. We have city council elections in early April. The election is non-partisan, with no official political party label on any candidate, but still the early months of the year are an opportunity for us to work toward putting leftist, environmentalist people into council seats. In the years when we are so fortunate as to support hot candidates running in hot races, we could choose to participate in the Green Party meeting via live-stream and electronic voting instead of spending a whole weekend out of town. This is not a huge, overriding factor, but it is something to think about. Perhaps other chapters have local election seasons that bump up against state party events. While I agree that in-person participation is preferable, there are times when it is nice to have the option of remote participation.I hope this provides enough positions and suggestions to be helpful.
The system just ate a comment that I spent two hours composing. After I stop being angry, I'll re-type it. Note to self: copy and paste every comment into a temporary Word document so it is not lost if the system eats it.
Our majority vote was negative on all factors of the proposal as presented. We had a constantly shifting vote split (4-1, 3-2) and a constantly shifting composition of people making up the majority on the various factors, but the outcome was always against the proposal as presented. Several members were strongly in favor of modified versions of certain factors in the proposal. I will give a better breakdown and detail the suggested modifications tomorrow, probably around noon, after I get through my morning meetings.
Harry, I can see the posts from my phone using Safari. But I can't see the poll. And I can't see the poll on my computer, either, although I did find it back when you sent the message about it. What do I need to push to see the poll? I'll need that after tonight's meeting.
