Americans Elect has postponed theirs, but in their case litigation had nothing to do with it.
The deadline for candidate ‘support clicks’ at Americans Elect Corporation was midnight last night (May 1), according to both its official Pre-Election Convention Rules and their online summary. That deadline came, and went, ten hours ago as we write. But as yet there is not hardly a peep from Americans Elect noting this significant (and, we guess, embarrassing) event in its short but troubled life.
- Not a press release…
- Not a notice on the web site’s ‘Candidates’ section that further votes won’t count toward candidate qualification for the next round of voting (although we note that new votes are still being recorded)
- Not an email to delegates
- No posted Board decisions regarding the impact of the failed vote on the upcoming Primaries
- No response to repeated voicemail messages from us to AECorp’s press secretary, Ileana Wachtel, requesting AECorp’s comment [EDIT]: See 11 AM update at the end of this article
- Nothing. Zip. (…crickets…)
Over the past few days our Kremlin-watchers here at AE Transparency have been considering and raucously debating the likelihood of various scenarios regarding how AECorp would be likely to finesse an explanation…and a disaster recovery response…for its failed first-round voting effort, but we must confess that we never even dreamed of this, the corporation’s actual response: pretending the whole thing just didn’t happen.
Not since the final episode of The Sopranos have Americans been so let down by a dramatic denouement.
Click over to see the various updates to that post, and go here to see how far off they were from meeting their goals. Of the four declared AE candidates, leader Buddy Roemer had a bit more than 20% of the required vote needed to make it to the second round; the other three declared candidates were all around five percent. Ron Paul, who isn’t an AE candidate and likely won’t be regardless, was the leader overall with more than double Roemer’s vote share, but that was still less than half the needed total. Given that, it’s hard to say how much good the postponement will do them, but clearly they had no choice. All this makes me wonder how their efforts to get on the Texas ballot in November are going. As a reminder, they need 49,799 valid signatures of registered voters, and their petitions are due later this month. Anybody have any information about this? If you’ve seen a petition for this, let us know. Kos has more, and thanks to Jason Stanford for the catch.
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