Pinal County Greens Pass Resolution Urging Jill Stein to Run for President

Apache Junction, Ariz., Oct. 12 -

The Pinal County Greens today passed a resolution urging Jill Stein to run for President.

The resolution asked Stein, a physician, educator, housewife, environmental health care advocate and former Green-Rainbow Party candidate for Massachusetts governor and secretary of state, to consider seeking the Green Party nomination for President because of her "proven experience, sharp intelligence, extraordinary political abilities, exemplary positions on issues, and her commitment to economic democracy as shown by her support for the Green New Deal and her recent activism on behalf of Occupy Boston."

The Pinal County Greens, member of the Arizona Green Party in America's second-fastest-growing county, noted that they had not yet made an endorsement in the Green Party presidential nomination race. But Pinal County Greens Co-Chair Richard Grayson said, "We are so impressed with Dr. Stein's credentials and character that we are enthusiastic about her potential campaign for President."

Pinal County Greens Pass Resolution Urging Arizona Green Party to Hold a 2012 Presidential Primary

Apache Junction, Ariz., July 26, 2011 -

Today the Pinal County Greens, a group of members of the Arizona Green Party in Pinal County, urged the state party to hold a 2012 Presidential primary. As this story in Ballot Access News explained:

Arizona law sets the 2012 presidential primary on February 28, but the law also gives the Governor the authority to change that date. On July 21, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer suggested she is inclined to move the primary into January. . .

Although press stories focus on the impact this would have on the Republican presidential contest, the proposed early Arizona primary could also impact the Libertarian Party and the Green Party. Both are entitled to a presidential primary in Arizona if they desire one. In 1996, the Arizona Libertarian Party and the Arizona Democratic Party won a court order, saying that if a party doesn’t want the state to hold a presidential primary for itself, then the state should respect the party’s wishes and not hold one. Republicans also refused a presidential primary in Arizona in 2004. Arizona held no presidential primaries before 1996.

In 2008 the Libertarian Party declined to participate in the state’s presidential primary, but held its own party-financed mail presidential primary. The Arizona Green Party has never before been entitled to participate in a government presidential primary. Although the Green Party successfully petitioned to be a qualified party in 2000 and 2008, it didn’t qualify in time for its own presidential primary. For 2012, however, the Greens are already qualified so they could have their first presidential primary if they wish to.

The resolution passed by the Pinal County Greens respectfully asks the state leadership of the Arizona Green Party to agree to hold its first presidential primary in 2012.

"We hope the Greens will take advantage of Arizona law and use a 2012 primary to gain visibility for our state Green Party as well as the Green Party of the United States, especially at a time when many Americans are disgusted with the Democrats and Republicans for their failures," said Richard Grayson, Co-Chair of the Pinal County Greens.

"Holding an official Arizona Green Party next winter will highlight progressive issues and our candidates for national and state office and gain us publicity and clout," Grayson said. It would also allow party members to fully participate in the political process."

Noting that Democrats are likely to refuse to hold a primary to avoid any sign of opposition to President Obama from the left, Grayson said, "Without an Arizona Green presidential primary in 2012, "there would be no progressive candidates coming to campaign in our state."

Pinal County Greens Pass Resolution Condemning Budget-Busting Deficit-Maker Jeff Flake

Apache Junction, Ariz., May 2 -

Today, the Pinal County Greens, members of the Arizona Green Party in Pinal County, passed a resolution condemning U.S. Rep. Jeff Flake, a candidate for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate, for being "a budget-busting deficit maker."

"When Jeff Flake entered the U.S House of Representatives for the first of what he promised would be three terms, the United States had a budget surplus," said Richard Grayson, Pinal County Greens co-chair and the 2010 Green Party candidate against Rep. Flake.

"In his many years in Congress, long after he broke his promise to serve only three terms, with his party in control of the House for most of those years, Jeff Flake has managed to bankrupt the country year by year with his policies," Grayson added. "Flake has wasted our money on egregious shit like tax cuts for his billionaire bankrollers while at the same time denying basic services like education for our students."

Grayson cited a new analysis by the Congressional Budget Office which clearly showed that our current mountainous budget deficit was caused by policies championed by Rep. Flake -- mainly the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- combined with the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis caused in part by the deregulation also championed by Rep. Flake.

"The Pinal County Greens would urge voters to consider Jeff Flake's record as a fiscally irresponsible budget buster in 2012," Grayson said.

Pinal County Greens Support Arizona Green Party's Ballot Status Petition Drive for 2012

Pinal County Greens are happy to help the Arizona Green Party achieve ballot status in the 2012 elections. Please read this memo from our Arizona Green Party co-chair Angel Torres:

Hola todos! Hope that 2011 has been good to you and your relations. The Arizona Green Party (AZGP) has achieved ballot status four times in our nearly 21-year history: 1992, 2000, 2008 and 2010. Our goal is to now achieve ballot status for 2012. By doing so, we would achieve ballot status for 3 consecutive elections, as well as reaching this goal for the fifth time. Now, to borrow a phrase from the sports world, we want to “Get One for the Thumb”! Volunteers have already begun to collect signatures for our ballot status petition drive for the 2012 elections, and we are asking YOU (yes, YOU) to be one of our volunteers.

As in the previous two election cycles, we need to collect at least 21,000 valid signatures of registered Arizona voters on our petitions for ballot status. We always set a goal of collecting at least 30,000 petition signatures (to account for signatures that may be invalidated by the county elections offices).

In order to accomplish our goal in a timely fashion, we need to recruit at least 100 volunteers to assist with this effort. We are only asking YOU to collect 15 signatures (one page) per week. At 1500 signatures per week, it should take us about 5 months to accomplish our goal. Obviously, with more volunteers we can accomplish our goal quicker and easier. With fewer volunteers, it will take longer and become more difficult. For the 2008 and 2010 elections, it took us until the final deadline (March) to get all our signatures collected. We would like to get this done ASAP for the 2012 elections. This will give us more time to focus on recruiting viable, quality Green Party candidates for 2012.

We already have printed copies of the Petition for Political Party Recognition. Any registered Arizona voter (not just Greens) may sign our petition. And, our volunteers (petition circulators) must also be a registered Arizona voter. But, they do not have to be registered Green. So, if you have friends, family members, co-workers or neighbors that want to assist us collecting signatures—FANTASTIC! As a matter of fact, these are the folks that you should first ask to sign our petitions. Make sure they fill it out completely (signature, printed name, residential address where registered, date of signing), or their signature will not count. Once the petition is completely filled out, complete the instructions on the back page (with your name, signature, and residential address where registered). If we emphasize a little “quality control”, it will minimize the numbers of signatures that the county elections offices will attempt to invalidate. Please use black or blue ink pens for the signatures (no pinks, purples, pencils, etc).

An IMPORTANT note: the ballot status petitions are county-specific. So, only registered Maricopa County voters should sign a petition for Maricopa County; only Yavapai County voters should sign a petition for Yavapai County, etc. Again, this requires a little “quality control” when soliciting signatures. YOU should first “qualify” the potential signer by asking “Are you a registered voter in Maricopa (or Yavapai, Pinal, etc) County?” Some of our printed petitions are blank (so that you can write in the specific county), and some of the petitions have the county name printed/typed in (for example: Maricopa).

Volunteers have already begun to collect signatures in Maricopa and Pima County. However, we need YOU (yes, YOU) to reach our minimum goal of 100 volunteers. We are only asking you to collect 15 signatures (one page) per week. If you are nervous, or have never collected signatures, that’s OK! We like to petition in pairs, so as to build TEAMWORK! It’s easier (and more fun) to petition with a fellow Green/volunteer. When collecting ballot status petition signatures, we also use the opportunity to educate folks about the Green Party (who we are, the Ten Key Values, our platform, etc).

The Arizona Green Party (AZGP) has another long-term goal: Permanent Ballot Status! As of January 1st (according to the Arizona Secretary of State) we now have 5,040 registered Green Party members in Arizona. In order for us to achieve permanent ballot status (and not have to collect ballot status petition signatures every two years), we will need to quadruple our registered Greens to at least 20,000. As we are collecting signatures and informing others about the Green Party, we should also be encouraging interested folks to register as new Green Party members. During the past 2 years, we have added 1,000 new Green Party members! One of our goals is to register 1,000 new Greens during 2011. Are you willing to assist us in this effort?

In anticipation of achieving ballot status for next year, we will also begin to recruit Green Party candidates for the 2012 elections! We are recruiting candidates for non-partisan races (school boards and city/town council), county offices (Board of Supervisors, etc), state legislature and statewide office (Corporation Commission) and U.S. Congress. We are looking for viable, quality candidates that will best represent the Arizona Green Party (AZGP), our platform and the issues we support.

You may be asking yourself “Where can I collect signatures?” Some good locations include: farmers’ markets, your local library, community festivals, art walks (First Friday in downtown Phoenix), university or college campuses, etc. Try to find a public location with lots of “foot traffic”. Talk to your local independent coffeehouse or bookstore manager to see if they will give you permission to petition. Also, check your local newspaper, New Times, College Times, etc. for possible events/locations.

So, are YOU ready to be one of our 100 volunteers? Are you ready to WOMAN-UP/MAN-UP? If so, just call our AZGP voicemail at (602) 417-0213. You may also send us an e-mail at info@azgp.org. Just leave us your name, phone number and/or e-mail address, and your U.S. Mail address. We will send you a packet that includes the Petition for Political Party Recognition, Green Party literature (so you can answer questions), and blank voter registration forms. When filled out, mail all petitions (and any new Green voter registration forms) to: Arizona Green Party (AZGP), P.O. Box 60173, Phoenix, AZ 85082. You may also drop off completed petitions and Green Party voter registration forms at our monthly Green Party meetings. Visit http://azgp.org or http://maricopagreens.org for our meeting schedule and locations (or call our voicemail).

Reflections on the Election of 2010 and the Arizona Green Party

Richard Grayson, the candidate for Congress from Apache Junction and a member of Pinal Greens and the Arizona Green Party, posted this on his blog earlier today:

It's now several weeks after the November 2 election. Even the closest races have been or will be decided soon, and we thought we'd give -- for ourselves, if no one else (like our entire campaign) -- some reflections on it.

Today's Arizona election results update shows that we got 3,407 votes in the Sixth Congressional District. (Sincere thanks to all the folks who voted for us.) That's more than the other two on-the-ballot Green candidates for Congress, the ones who were "endorsed" by the Arizona Green Party, not pointedly sued in federal and state court to keep us off the ballot like we were. Of course, we got 1.36% of the vote, and Leonard Clark in the Third District got 1.58% (3,298 votes) and Rebecca DeWitt in the Fourth District got 2.57% (2,365 votes). The Arizona Green Party also endorsed William Crum in the Second Congressional District, but he ran as a write-in (apparently the AZGP's antipathy to write-in candidacies extends only to those candidates they don't like anyway) and there are just 290 write-in votes (just 0.11%, some no doubt for Mickey Mouse or Lady Gaga).

Our 1.36% share of the vote in the Sixth Congressional District is about what the "endorsed" U.S. Senate candidate, Jerry Joslyn got: 1.44% statewide. For someone who ran a "serious" campaign and who appeared on TV debates, that was a pathetic showing. In the state Treasurer's race, Thomas Meadows achieved 2.58% of the vote, beating the pants off Joslyn in a similar four-way race. Compared to Joslyn's 24,603 votes, Thomas Meadows managed to garner 46,115 votes, making him the Arizona Green Party's top vote-getter along with the Arizona Green Party's champ of 2010, 20-year-old Benjamin Pearcy, who got 47,121 votes running for one of two open seats on the Corporation Commission. Go Benjamin! Not bad for a 20-year-old kid who lives on Mill Avenue (near the Starbucks that was his campaign HQ) and who couldn't testify at the federal trial when the Arizona Green Party tried to kick all of us non-endorsed candidates off the ballot because he was in jail at the time.

Indeed, if Pearcy or Meadows -- who's 27 and was described as "a tarot card reader with less than a dollar to his name" in the New York Times article about Republican Steve May recruiting Mill Avenue street people to run write-in candidacies in the Arizona Green Party primary -- had been the Arizona Green Party's gubernatorial candidate and had gotten 3,000-4,000 more votes, the party would have achieved the magic number of 50,000 votes to make its place on the ballot secure for the next four years (as state Green Parties did in New York, Massachusetts and Texas), without having to get petitions again in 2012 or being subject to the law that made the party vulnerable to write-in candidates winning primaries with a literal handful of votes (we won with six votes).

The non-endorsed Arizona Green Party candidate for governor, Larry Gist -- who petitioned his way onto the ballot -- had the worst percentage showing of any party candidate, endorsed or not -- with a truly bad 0.93% of the vote: 16,128 votes (again, remember that Meadows got 30,000 votes more than he did although they both ran in four-way statewide races).

Another supposedly "sham" candidate, Theodore Gomez, got 42,645 votes running for the other seat on the Corporation Commission. If the good results (at least by Arizona Green Party 2010 election standards) for the candidates supposedly recruited by the Republican Party to siphon off votes for Democrats don't gall the bosses of the Arizona Green Party, you can blame it on their trademark stupidity.

Suing the ballot-qualified candidates in federal court and then in state court -- a miserable failure both times -- was the perhaps the height of the Arizona Green Party's stupidity in this election. It will be their major contribution to the 2010 election and only solidified the public image of the Arizona Green Party as a laughingstock in the minds of both conservative and liberal Arizonans.

And it was needless. The Arizona Green Party is very touchy about not "endorsing" Democratic candidates even in races where there is no Green candidate, but they didn't hesitate in letting the Arizona Democratic Party pay for their lawsuits. Nor did they care about employing aggressive and untruthful tactics (the federal complaint contained numerous lies and errors, and in court the Democratic Party's hired lawyers said the Arizona Green Party didn't want to be associated with us because of a swastika on our blog here, completely ignoring the obvious context in which we were protesting the Nazi-like SB 1070).

Indeed, as Leonard Clark, an endorsed candidate for Congress, said in disgust, the lawsuits had the effect of showing the Arizona Green Party disregarding several of its Ten Key Values (Grassroots Democracy, Social Equality, Decentralization), the party's credo that we explicitly swore (and still affirm) our allegiance to many times -- though that wasn't good enough for the poohbahs of the Arizona Green Party to consider us anything more than a "sham" candidate.

We never understood the Arizona Green Party and Democratic Party contending that the "sham" candidates would siphon off votes and allow the Republicans to win some races they otherwise wouldn't. The laughable logical conclusion of this argument seemed to be that they expected the "sham" (non-endorsed) candidates would actually do better than the "real" (endorsed) candidates in garnering votes! If any Green candidate would take votes that would otherwise go to Democrats, why did it matter if she was endorsed by the party or not?

The AZGP bosses don't seem to understand that a political party on the ballot isn't a club; it's a party. It uses the state to hold its primaries. Anyone can join at any time. The Secretary of State or local elections officials have no business asking any Arizonan why she is choosing to register as a member of a political party or if she is a "sincere" or "genuine" member of that party. Thank God in America we don't have to uphold loyalty oaths to political parties.

Secretary of State Ken Bennett was right when he said he had no choice but to uphold the candidacies of people who, like us -- or Benjamin Pearcy, Thomas Meadows or Theodore Gomez -- who upheld the letter of the law and got their paperwork in without anything being wrong with it. If you don't like it, Arizona Green Party bosses, then you're fools for working so hard to get on the ballot. You can't guarantee that the candidates you disfavor will not win your primaries; just ask the Republican party leaders in Delaware, Nevada and Alaska.

The Democratic Party also were hypocrites in the so-called "Siphongate" brouhaha. It's clear that Arizona Democrats were complicit in covertly supporting Libertarian candidacies among conservative voters, just as Democrats in other states got fake "Tea Party" candidates on the ballots to siphon off votes for Republicans.

Meanwhile, challenging the non-endorsed Arizona Green Party candidates was moot, given that there's not one race in the entire state where any Green Party candidate, endorsed or not, made a difference in who won an election. The margin of victory for every Republican who won was greater -- usually much greater -- than the percentage of the vote garnered by any Arizona Green Party candidate.

Indeed, in the race where a third-party mattered most, Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords' successful race for re-election in the Eighth Congressional Distict, the 3.93% of the vote for the Libertarian candidate was twice the size of Giffords' 1.46% margin of victory. There was no Green candidate, and if there had no Libertarian candidate, the Republicans probably would have picked up their third Democratic U.S. House seat.

It appears that none of the endorsed Arizona Green Party candidates for the state legislature ran in any district that was not reliably Republican or Democratic. Linda Macias, who we (as a member of the Pinal County Greens) endorsed for State Representative in District 21, got a really impressive 17.15% of the vote, but she ran in a race with two Republicans and no Democrats or other candidates.

We were not impressed, as we said, in our meeting by phone conference with the Arizona Green Party. If we were so abhorrent to them, why did they allow us to vote on endorsing other candidates for Congress and the state legislature? Why did they invite us to join their Yahoo Group for Arizona Green Party candidates?

What surprised us was the low level of educational attainment among the Arizona Green Party leaders. But of course, in Arizona, there's a much lower percentage of college graduates than in most states, so that's kind of understandable. But the stupidity of some of their questions and remarks floored us. Some of them didn't seem to understand that members of Congress serve in Washington, D.C. and not Phoenix or were not subject to the state Clean Elections laws. They seemed ignorant about electoral history and few seemed actually to have taken part in campaigns despite being around for a while. Perhaps it was more naïveté or ignorance than stupidity, but these were the leaders of the Arizona Green Party.

Anyway, we wonder what their contribution to the election of 2010 was. Arizona Green Party bosses seem content with their little fiefdom -- one gets the impression that these are people who are content to be big machers in a little world rather than foot soldiers in the Democratic party.

Of course we would be hypocrites if we didn't understand that. Nobody runs for Congress or the state legislature or anything else without being somewhat of an egotist. It's just that egotists are helped if they're also a little savvy.

And so, since we still adhere to the principles of the Arizona Green Party's Ten Key Values -- like transparency, which is why we posted the memo by Claudia Ellquist that so pissed off the party bosses -- even if they don't, we've decided to remain a registered voter in the Arizona Green Party.

And just to piss them off and give them advance notice of 20 months, we are today announcing that we will be a candidate for the Arizona Green Party nomination for Congress in the 2012 primary. That is, if they can do the work to make sure we're on the ballot again. All we need is one write-in vote to win! And our name's easier to spell than "Murkowski."

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(We're posting the Arizona Green Party logo on top of this post because it concerns the Arizona Green Party. Previously the party bosses complained to Google's Blogger service about us using the logo without permission and so we removed it from our website even though all Pinal County Greens are members of the Arizona Green Party, and we put up the logo of Canada's Green Party, who are a little less inclined toward censorship than the Arizona Green Party, for all their talk about supporting the Ten Key Values. Apparently the Arizona Green Party doesn't believe in the "fair use" provision of U.S. copyright law and so we await their next legal move, as they apparently have nothing better to do.)