How the US Green Party Can Begin to Regain Trust — and its Own Dignity
Until the US Green Party cleans house and ensures that it is at least as democratic as its platform aims to be, it doesn’t deserve credibility — or your votes.
In the wake of abysmal 2020 election results (0.2%) and the purging of state parties which rejected the ethically challenged Russiagating ‘nominee,’ Howie Hawkins, there are legitimate questions from rank and file Greens as to how the party can overcome the mess its ‘leaders’ have created. Anyone who believes in Green values — inside and outside of the party — wants to see the party survive and grow to be an electoral force. But it can’t do so at odds with the values it claims to advocate — the values that attract a unique portion of the voting public to vote for the party in the first place. What follows are some humble suggestions for how the party can reclaim voters’ electoral trust.
Make all future Presidential primaries a national popular vote contest
For a party that claims to support proportional representation and abolishing the electoral college, it’s immensely hypocritical to have a primary process that allows someone to ‘win’ with a majority of the delegates but only a third of the popular votes — as Hawkins did. Because many state parties are underdeveloped, a candidate can finagle all of a state’s delegates with a ginned-up popular vote that is as low as double digits (for example, the infamous Kansas secret ‘primary’ held without public notice). That has to stop.
Holding a straightforward national popular vote has the advantage of taking away the ability of state party leadership to keep candidates they don’t like off ballots — as North Carolina did. And having the vote held by a reputable online voting system provider with third party audits and certification could separate the voting process from any internal party intrigue.
End the concept of national party recognized candidates and the PCSC
The Green Party has always criticized its exclusion from Presidential debates. And yet it created a process to effectively legitimize the exclusion of its own Presidential primary candidates from debates, forums, and other forms of promotion. In theory, the process of setting up various hoops and hurdles for candidates to clear in order to be deemed viable is supposed to ensure that the party advances candidates both capable of doing well in November as well as representing the party well. Those are both important goals. But the party’s voters should decide who can best meet those goals — through a robust, open contest of free ideas. A process to stage manage who gets presented to those voters and may become the nominee is undemocratic and against Green values.
The recognition process and the Presidential Campaign Support Committee (PCSC) that runs it has been used as a means for insiders to set up roadblocks for candidates they don’t like and to insulate the party from changes in direction that might destabilize their control over the party. In short, a small number of ‘leaders’ are afraid of the will of Green voters and the recognition process allows them to steer voters towards mostly establishment choices. That’s exactly the thing the Green Party has been criticizing the Commission on Presidential Debates for doing for decades.
Just let the members of the party decide who is viable and who is not — and give candidates an equal shot at making their case to the voters.
Any national party co-chair or media committee member campaigning for any primary candidate should lose their position
Making primaries a national vote driven process takes away the many shady corners where numerous state party leaders can influence the process for their candidate. However, on a national level, the influence of the Steering Committee — the co-chairs of the party — can lend power to a campaign and give that campaign an air of inevitability before a real contest has even begun.
It was unconscionable that Andrea Merida Cuellar was allowed to serve as co-chair of the party while also serving as manager of the Hawkins campaign. Worse still, she and her campaign benefited from party funds in her attendance at the Annual National Meeting, where she campaigned for Hawkins. That ethical lapse was a subject of an FEC investigation into the Green Party. The fact that she wasn’t removed from her position or even censured speaks volumes about the ethical and moral dysfunction of the party.
The undue influence of Hawkins team members on the Media Committee also influenced the party’s over emphasis of Hawkins in its promotion of primary campaigns.
Green apologists have claimed that you couldn’t possibly exclude all members of all the various committees of the party from participating in the election. As the argument goes, in a small party, that would leave few ‘hands on deck’ to advance a competitive primary. But no one has asked for that — what those interested in an ethical Green primary have asked for is simply that the members of key committees, especially those that speak for the party and control its media presentation, be fully and officially neutral for the duration of the race. There’s no justifiable reason to oppose that, and every reason, based on the party’s values, to implement it.
No poll taxes on Green Party primaries
This is already against the law in state government run primaries. But because the Green Party has made itself the home of various archaic undemocratic abuses even the Democrats and Republicans wouldn’t publicly embrace, some state parties have taken to requiring that you pay dues to be able to vote in party primaries (i.e. where the party doesn’t have ballot access).
No. Just no. Because this isn’t the Deep South in the 1960s and it’s also no longer acceptable to ask would-be voters to do literacy tests or count the number of jellybeans in a jar.
Open the debates
It should be simple — let candidates debate, let voters decide. The argument of a slippery slope towards an unruly, unmanageable free-for-all just doesn’t hold up. It’s pretty much the same dismissive argument that Green nominees are told when they ask to be allowed in debates run by the Commission on Presidential Debates.
There are many ways to have open democratic debates. For example, initial debates can be done in groups of candidates (e.g. with twelve candidates, two groups of six).
No, you can’t realistically have 100 candidates debate. But the party only had several candidates who were earnestly jockeying for debate time in 2020 and it somehow still couldn’t manage to fairly give time to such a small number of active candidates. It wasn’t because the party was unable to - it was because those pulling the strings in a stage managed primary didn’t want to do so. It’s unacceptable that they were allowed to get away with that.
Practice what you preach, Green Party — open your own debates.
Moving forward
The aforementioned reforms could help the US Green Party regain some of the trust it lost in a mismanaged, ethically-challenged 2020 Presidential primary. However, Green Party leadership has so far entirely refused to learn any lessons from the 2020 presidential primary debacle and has rebuffed all calls for democratic reform within the party. Since they won’t live up to their own professed values voluntarily, it’s time for the voters to show them who’s boss.
Don’t vote for the US Green Party or sign their petitions for ballot access until they make earnest steps as a party to adhere to basic democratic principles.
Don’t delude yourself into thinking anything will be lost by your choice to holdout. No one needs another DNC. If you were looking for a shady cabal of ethically-challenged hustlers posing as a party, the Democratic Party has already perfected that shtick.
There are other third party candidates and independents you can choose from if you want more choice than the crooked duopoly can provide. And, of course, you can choose to run for office as an independent or with another third party. As someone who ran for local office as a Green, I can tell you that my state party did absolutely nothing to assist my local campaign, so there’d be nothing lost there either.
As voters, if we want better, we have to choose better. The Green Party has always advanced that notion. It’s past time that they are subjected to the same scrutiny and high expectations in democratic values that they have suggested for others.