The Votes at Work

(Note: Any words or phrases, found underlined below, correspond to links. Also note: Main Street Gov covets and protects voter privacy and confidentiality, and understands full-well the boundless capacities for online intrusion of databases. From time to time, we will thus divert/transport incoming votes offline. From time to time, we will displace them in hardcopy, in paper format even, to a location where no one unauthorized will see it or have access to it.)

Now, for the Voter Protocol knows as “A.N.N.A.”

or

“Assemble. Nestle. Notify. Apply.”

Assemble

Here, we assemble the issues that Americans find much common ground on. On some legislative issues, American voters agree to disagree. But on others, they are by and large in agreement, irrespective of their political stripe. So we’ve brought some of those together and called them Bill-Requests. When Bill-Requests gather steam, they become Bill-Demands.

While, obviously, we do not anticipate everyone to vote in cohesion with the other, the bulk of our Bill-Requests (BR’s) encompass overwhelmingly non-divisive issues, enjoying broad support across the political spectrum, nationwide. We’ve tested these BR’s for sentiment, with enough voters in a number of states, geographically apart and ideologically disparate, and found that to be true. (FYI: our “Anti-Corruption” Bill-Request is by far the most popular across the board; our “Level The Playing Field” Bill Request finds its most ardent support among small business owners.)

Nestle

Here, we nestle votes together for those Bill-Requests by two separate means, working independently of and, in time, inter-dependently with each other.

The first, of course, entails taking in electronic votes; anyone who wants to, can vote online already — although, for now, we’re discouraging it by not encouraging it.

The second will be all about amassing real votes, ink-on-paper, aboard a fleet of Mobile Voting Stations or MV’s. These will be buses, basically, and beautiful ones at that, emblazoned in patriotic imagery, that’ll begin canvassing the country in the years ahead.

Why bother with MV’s? Many reasons, but here are two:

First, there’ll soon be 230 million eligible voters in the United States. A lot of them will never exercise their eligibility to vote in any Midterm or General Election. Can’t blame them — having to choose so far between a Republican and a Democrat, both either Establishment creatures or malleable into them, both servile to Wall Street and K Street, or their own special interests, can make the exercise both dreary and purposeless. Main Street Gov would like face-to-face encounters with these folks, to give them a reason to participate in an election.

Second, there are tens of millions of eligible voters and near-eligible voters (just a few years away from either turning 18 years old or becoming U.S. citizens) who have little or limited access to the internet to vote on Main Street Gov. We’d like to reach them, as well.

In Phase 1, the MV’s won’t go everywhere. Instead, they’ll focus on select parts of the country, places the powerbrokers on Capitol Hill go to for re-election. By Phase 2, count on all 48 contiguous states being strategically covered. By Phase 3, we’ll get one such bus to Alaska’s congressional district at-large, and another ready in Honolulu to tour the 1st and 2nd congressional districts of Hawaii.

MV’s will have high-priority Districts and mission-critical Districts in their sights especially. Texas’ 5th District, home to the Chairman of the House Committee on Financial Services, Jeb Hensarling, who oversees a body that is increasingly ground zero for the most dangerous legislation making its way out of Congress, qualifies as high-priority. Wisconsin’s 1st — home to Speaker Paul Ryan, would be mission-critical.

From rudimentary surveys conducted in 2012 by the Economic Party, we know for a fact that voters in ex-Speaker John Boehner’s district (Ohio’s 8th) will be overwhelmingly supportive of most if not all the Bill-Requests we’ve laid out here. As will enough voters in Wisconsin’s 1st or California’s 12th, home to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

The 2014 lesson of former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s sizable defeat at the hands of voters in Virginia’s 7th is, we presume, not lost to any of the long-entrenched Congressional Leadership, be they at the top like Cantor was, or in the near-top as some committee/subcommittee chairpersons are. That Cantor was the shepherd who led the flock through the pasture of TARP, in 2008, and force-fed it to those who resisted, is probably not known to most in Virginia’s 7th — had it been, the sizable defeat would’ve (no doubt) fast morphed into a full-scale rout.

By design, our voter aggregation methodology can be incisive and surgical if need be at the district level, just as it can be expansive and dispersive if required to the state level. We know most our Bill-Requests will summon statewide voter-support in Harry Reid’s Nevada, and Charles Schumer’s New York, and Mitch McConnell’s Kentucky. A perusal of those Bill-Requests, will tell you why.

Simply said, Main Street Gov is a home for a political union across the political spectrum, and a solution to government dysfunction, malfeasance, and corruption — most anyone, anywhere, be it red state or blue state, can jive with that.

Notify

Here, we notify the powers-that-be in Washington DC that we have a high-voter-intensity Bill-Request, now called a Bill-Demand, with the following parameters met and/or surpassed:

• The Bill-Request gathers enough votes to exceed critical-mass in sheer numbers
• The Bill-Request gathers enough votes to meet distribution-needs across the Counties and Congressional districts that matter most. Here, Congressional Committee assignments and seniority, for example, are considered.
• The Bill-Request gathers enough votes to assume persuasive-power. Here, the job approval/disapproval ratings of politicians, margin(s) of victory in the last election, and strengths/weaknesses of the opponent(s) defeated in that election, among other criteria, are assessed and plugged into a very special calculator for a rather telling result.

Apply

Here, the application of political stress upon the politicians begins, starting in the Legislative and extending towards the Executive. Remember, A handful of small spaces in a few states can determine entire Presidential elections — in 2012, for example, Hillsborough County in the so-called I-4 corridor became disproportionately important to winning Florida, whose 29 electoral votes serve as gateway to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Florida’s Pinellas and Osceola counties also wield disproportionate weight when it comes to Presidential Elections. By no accident, Main Street Gov is centered in Florida.

Once the high-voter-intensity Bill-Demand has been delivered to Congress, we monitor any and all legislators (irrespective of Party affiliation) who ignore, impede, or in any way obstruct the Bill-Demand from gaining legislative traction, and report those findings to voters on Main Street Gov so that they may hold those politicians accountable come Election Day. In a steady, streaming, but relentless administration of pressure, we publicize those reports for the noncompliant legislators to see, and alert their chiefs of staff accordingly.

Of course, all legislators who assist the legislation — and especially those who sponsor it — are duly recognized and (as best we can) amply rewarded via notifications directed at their constituents.

Can you give me a real-world example of how the votes will be put to work?

Without getting into proprietary detail, here’s how from the perspective of, say, the U.S. House of Representatives…

Let’s say a Bill Request that falls into the Banking category — like the Anti-Crisis Bill Request — garners a lot of votes on our site and at our Mobile Voting Stations (MV’s). In the U.S. House of Representatives, the banking category falls into the domain of the Committee on Financial Services. It’s called the “Money” Committee for how much Wall Street and K Street money sloshes around its chamber — and how rich one can get after one’s done with the Public $ervice of serving on the Committee.

(FYI: At the time of our last count, the Committee on Financial Services seated over 60 Reps. Yes, it’s a fat committee, and the fattest by far. In relation, the House Committee on Ethics seats just 10 Reps, although we’re not quite sure what they do.)

We look at each Member on the “Money” Committee, starting with the most senior, and construct a series of graphs, spreadsheets, flowcharts, etc, to juggle and position a cornucopia of relevant data points on them and the Congressional Districts they emanate from, their margins of victory in the last election, the pros and cons of their last political opponent, campaign finance cash flows and their sources, donors that present a political liability and the legislative favors done to secure those donors, and any gaugeable changes to the ideological bent, demographics and voter composites of each District — especially any rising numbers of Independents and marginally-attached Party-registrants in the District, the trajectory of the Members’ favorability/unfavorability ratings in the period following re-election, the dynamics of other job approval/disapproval metrics, and their voting record on specific “radioactive” bills we’ve had on our radar, like the bills authored in the House (ghostwritten by lawyers working for Wall Street) to gut any semblance of reform.

Next, about each Member on this Committee, we ask ourselves the question: Can the incumbent be defeated in the next election, in a 3-way race if applicable, assuming a challenge from a highly principled and disciplined challenger, of the kind the Economic Party can very easily produce if required. We ask the question: Can the incumbent be defeated by a contestant running on a brand new Platform whose centerpiece is ethics and Public Service without any $ sign attached to $ervice? Can the incumbent be defeated by a candidate whose moral compass dictates that to serve on the Banking Committee is to defend Main Street from Wall Street at every turn that a need to defend is warranted? Can the incumbent be defeated by someone who at no time, and in no way, implies or infers that he/she is there to serve the banks? — hat-tip: Spencer Bachus, R-Alabama, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee in the 112th Congress, who was kind enough to elucidate that “my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.”

We have the means and the methodology to extract answers to these questions, in each every District represented in the Money Committee, in a telling way.

Once answers to all of the aforementioned are integrated, we produce sort of a political “hologram” for each Committee member, and from each of those holographic images a numeric is elicited to show what might be needed in votes to instill a highly concentrated dose of electoral fear-factor in the Representative.

As we surpass the number for each Committee member, we notify the Member’s chief of staff on Capitol Hill that Main Street has a Bill-Request, thereafter reclassified a Bill-Demand, supported by enough constituents in the constituency of that Member to probably make his or her re-election at the next election at least an uncertainty if the Member fails to pay attention, take heed, or act upon their wishes, in a timely manner.

At that point, it is possible that the staff of the Member will want proof that we do actually possess the Votes to make the prospect of their boss’ reelection at least an uncertainty. So, we invite an appointed designate to visit a facility of Main Street Gov to verify the veracity of the Votes. When that individual arrives on location, we present him/her with all the evidence needed to prove our point. (All inspections, examinations, and random tests for accuracy, of that evidence, will follow a strict and inflexible regimen.)

If the staffer leaves convinced that we do indeed possess the Votes — and it’ll be a rare day and a drunk staffer when we fail to convince — he/she will report back to his or her boss, accordingly. And the rest will be up to some degree of risk assessment on the part of the Member and his or her advisers.

Some Reps will be happy to oblige with anything that they know to have widespread local and national support, that they know in their hearts to be the right thing. Others won’t be so happy to relate. Some will actively resist and seek urgent funding from their Party Leadership and their Wall Street/K Street bundlers, to hopefully circumvent the amassing political threat with intensive infusions of emergency dollars. A few will advantage the opportunity to raise all-time-record amounts of special interest cash, a bonanza that we assure we’ll turn into an edge that’s cuts both ways. A simple reminder from Wikipedia’s entry about Dave Brat, the challenger who defeated Eric Cantor:

Brat defeated Cantor by a 12-point margin. Brat was outspent by Cantor 40:1. Cantor spent over $5 million, while Brat raised $200,000 and did not spend all of it. An analysis of campaign filings conducted by the Center for Responsive Politics concluded that Brat did not receive any donations from political action committees. The Center ultimately conceded, “it’s almost impossible to profile Brat’s typical donor, because he had so few.” Brat’s win was a historic and stunning victory, as it was the first time a sitting House Majority Leader was defeated in [a] primary race since the position was created in 1899.

Moreover, running to Party Leaders that are also Members of Congress for help, won’t help, because Main Street Gov will be collecting votes in volume in the Districts of the Party Leadership as well. Again, we can focus our vote-gathering operation to specific Districts using conventional marketing methods, or let the transaction disperse virally to all Districts in the country.

No matter what, we have good reason to expect that Alaskans in the Last Frontier state, in the northernmost end of the country, will support our legislative efforts pretty much the way Floridians will in the Sunshine State, at the southernmost tip of the country.

In the end, the pressure will be on. And we intend to make that pressure aggregate, then intensify, until the subject under pressure relents or folds, or decides to take his or her chances, opting to meet his or her political Maker, the Voter, on Nov 3 2020.

Do we think all of this will go down easy? Of course, not. Nobody said this’ll be easy. This is, after all, Main Street — not Easy Street!

Visit Main Street Gov for more.