See a flood of ...

[Sentinelrv]

Post some here please. I don't see any and want to post one.

 

[Justinfrom1776]

I like this one.

 

[Lucille]

Via Lew:

 

[___j___]

Gary Johnson and Ron Paul Write-Ins will roughly finish with 1% of the vote.

Ron had more support than that and they know it.

Well, since Gary only got 1M votes in the general election, and Ron Paul got 2M in the repub primary, clearly anybody paying attention ought to 'know' that the liberty-movement has more support than the election-night returns might suggest. But do we have any specific numbers, in terms of exit-polls asking for a second choice, or statewide random-sample polling asking if you voted, and either way asking who your first/second/third choices would have been, to show *exactly* how much support we have, at the present moment?

p.s. My hope was that repubs in California would figure out that Obama was going to win all the electoral college votes from their state no matter what they did, and therefore vote Ron Paul (certified write-in there) and/or Gary Johnson (on the ballot) and/or Virgil Goode and/or James Madison, to send a message. There are 5m repubs in CA alone, after all, and the lesser-weevil rule simply does not apply to CA repubs in their presidential vote-picks. Ron Paul got 10% of the votes in the repub primary aka 200k people. Instead, 97% of california repubs (those that bothered to vote anyways) confirmed Mitt as their champion. Gary Johnson got 125k aka 1% of california repubs, and Hoefling got 33k... but even added together those numbers are lower than Ron Paul's showing in the primary.

http://co.humboldt.ca.us/election/results/2012/1106-ElectionNightFinalReport.pdf

Out of 17116 repub-leaning voters in Humboldt county CA, better than 9 out of 10 voted for Mitt ... even though the math behind the lesser-weevil rule is totally INAPPLICABLE to that particular race in that particular geographical location (because Obama was gonna win 100% of the electoral-college-votes from CA no matter what California repubs did). Election-clerks at the polls in that county were also lazy with the write-in ballots, marking over 50% of the 163 mail-in-write-in ballots as 'unresolved' and then going even further and marking literally 100% of the 231 write-in vote that were cast on polling-day as 'unresolved' also. Possibly they will get around to doing the work required to tabulate the write-in votes at some point, but I'm not holding my breath. Of the write-in votes which *were* counted, the Paul/Napolitano ticket got 86% of the voters. (If we apply that same percentage to the ballots that were marked by election-clerks as overvotes-aka-doublevotes and the undervotes-aka-blanks for the presidential race, then perhaps Ron Paul would have garnered 600 votes in Humboldt county, compared to 685 votes for Gary Johnson. More conservatively, I estimate that Ron Paul likely received ~300 votes, and almost certainly got 200. Of course, as of right now Humboldt county is 'officially' only giving him 67 votes... sigh.) Adding up all the potential liberty-voters, Gary + Ron + Hoefling + Virgil + Abstain + Unresolved, and extrapolating, we might have won 3% of the nationwide popvote.

But the key point is not that some set of liberty-candidates got about 3% of the votes cast in California on 6th Nov 2012, but rather than The Party Romineey managed to get way better than 9 out of 10 repub-leaning voters that bothered to visit polling-places this year. Even more importantly, using data from 2004 and 2008 for making some assumptions about how many repub-leaning-voters live in CA, by my calculations ~1.2 million California repubs stayed home -- or perhaps voted for Obama since they saw him as the lesser of the weevils when compared to Mitt. (Nationwide I'm getting that perhaps 4 or 5 millions repubs stayed home... which means 25% of the disgusted lived *just* in California.) If those repub-leaning folks had been too disgusted to vote for Mitt, they could have voted for Gary Johnson or for Ron Paul, easily doubling the nationwide liberty-vote-count from 1m general election votes up to 2m. Truth be told, I'm absolutely positively certain that the 4.5-4.7 million repubs that overcame inertia and drug themselves to the polling-place were *not* in fact 95% composed of Romney fans. They just voted for Mitt because they didn't understand that, for a California repub, the only (useful) point of a presidential-vote is to SEND A MESSAGE forward into the future, about what sort of repub prez nominee you would like to see. Voting for somebody besides Mitt would prolly hurt his feelings, but it certainly wouldn't cost him anything tangible -- every one of the ecVotes from CA is already locked up for Obama.

Anyways, until repubs in California (and IL NY HI DC et cetera) fully grok this fact, we'll continue to see the average repub voter follow the crowd, or stay home in disgust. Exit polls and statewide-random-polls would give us a better idea of how many of the million that stayed home, or the four million that followed the repub herd and voted for Mitt, would *actually* have voted for a liberty-nominee, if they thought they had a viable choice. When 2016 rolls around, if we don't manage to get a liberty-candidate as the official repub nominee, I want to have educated a large subset of repub-voters in heavily-dem-states that they are free to vote for the liberty-candidate anyways, at no cost to themselves or their party. (Swing-state voters do not have the same luxury.) While we're at it, we ought to reach out to dem-leaning voters in heavily repub states, and tell them they are free to vote for the libertarian ticket, or for the liberty-repub-not-quite-nominee, to send a message.