Thursday, February 20, 2014

Proposal #19: Nominate Presidential and Vice Presidential Candidates as a Ticket

DRAFT This is a draft proposal which has not yet been voted on by the committee.

Proposed by Aaron Starr.


  • Problem: Delegates devote much attention to who will be selected as our Presidential nominee. Not so much for our Vice Presidential nominee. We often do not know who will emerge as a Vice Presidential Nominee until just before the nomination. And because the Presidential candidate did not run as a team with the Vice Presidential candidate while seeking the nomination, the Vice Presidential nominee is often not incorporated into the campaign afterward.
  • Solution: Nominate our Presidential/Vice Presidential nominees as a single ticket.
  • Benefits:

Bylaws of the Libertarian Party

ARTICLE 11: CONVENTIONS

  1. Votes cast for "None of the Above" in voting on the Party's nominees for President and Vice-President, the Party Officers, and at-large members of the National Committee, shall be considered valid. Should a majority of the votes be cast for "None of the Above" in the Presidential or /Vice-Presidential balloting, no candidates shall be nominated for that those offices. Should "None of the Above" be selected for any Party office, that position shall be declared vacant and none of the losing candidates for that position may be selected to fill the vacancy for that term of office.

ARTICLE 14: PRESIDENTIAL AND VICE-PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS
  1. Nominations of candidates for President and Vice-President of the United States may be made only at the Regular Convention immediately preceding a Presidential election. The Party’s nominees for President and Vice President shall be chosen as a slate.
  2. No candidate may be nominated for President or Vice-President who is ineligible under the United States Constitution, who has not expressed a willingness to accept the nomination of the Party as part of that slate, who served as a stand-in candidate during the current election cycle, or who is not a member of the Party. A stand-in is an individual who has agreed to be placed on a state affiliate’s nomination petition prior to the selection of nominees by the Libertarian Party at Convention.

Convention Special Rules of Order of the Libertarian Party

RULE 7: NOMINATION OF PRESIDENTIAL AND VICE-PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES
  1. No person slate shall be nominated for President or and Vice-President unless at least 30 registered delegates join in the nomination in writing submitted to the Chair. No delegate may join in nominating more than one candidate for each office slate. The affixing of signatures to a nominating petition per this requirement shall be effected by a transfer of signature tokens issued by the Credentials Committee.
  2. The Party's nominees for President and Vice President shall be chosen by majority vote. If no candidate slate has attained a majority, the candidate one with the fewest votes and any candidates polling less than 5% shall be struck from subsequent ballots. This procedure shall be repeated after every ballot in which no candidate slate has received a majority vote, until one candidate attains a majority.
  3. Each delegation shall tabulate its total vote, and the delegation chair shall deliver a written total to the Secretary. When all the delegations have submitted their votes, the Secretary shall declare the voting closed. At this point, an announcement of each delegation's vote total shall be made by delegation chairs in alphabetical order beginning with a randomly selected delegation.
  4. The Party's nominee for Vice-President shall be chosen by the same procedure as for the Presidential nominee except that the Presidential nominee shall have the privilege of addressing the Convention for 5 minutes, after nominations have been made but before voting has begun, for the purpose of endorsing or objecting to any of the Vice-Presidential nominees. Nominations for Vice-President shall close after selection of the Presidential nominee.
  5. Nominating and seconding speeches for each candidate slate shall be limited in duration as follows: to a total of 20 minutes.
    1. President: Total of 16 minutes;
    2. Vice-President: Total of 11 minutes.
    A delegate who collects the required number of nominating tokens so designated may speak up to 5 minutes in favor of voting for None Of The Above.


Key

  • removed - red, strikethrough
  • added - blue, underline, italic

2 comments:

  1. I'm not sure whether I support this. However, I would encourage everyone to give this very serious thought before supporting is, as it makes a major change to our most public campaigns.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This concept has merit and requires serious consideration.

    Disclaimer:
    The Libertarian Party of Oregon has an unresolved legal dispute with the LNC Inc resulting from their hiring of the Oregon Republican Party’s Lawyer, then sponsoring his litigation against us to through signing a conflict of interest release in pursuing an agenda of replacing our state party leadership through a sponsored coup, initiated by officers of the LNC at the time and composed of current members of the bylaws committee. Further our delegation was not seated in 2012 due to a poisoned credentials committee which included several of the plaintiffs in the dispute and the Chairperson of the LNC at the time was willing to allow that committee to violate the bylaws and their authority under RROR at the Las Vegas Convention.

    You may consider my statements on this matter bias or experience depending on your disposition.

    ReplyDelete