Subject: Message from Tom Round: Fw: MoveOn's online presidential cyber-primary

From: Rick Hasen

Date: 6/26/2003, 6:12 AM

To: election-law

Tom Round wrote:

-------- Original Message --------

Subject:	Fw: MoveOn's online presidential cyber-primary
Date:	Thu, 26 Jun 2003 15:55:06 +1000
From:	Tom Round <t.round@griffith.edu.au>
To:	owner-election-law_gl@majordomo.lls.edu

Garance Franke-Ruta, "Zero Sum: Why MoveOn will be the real winner of its own presidential primary," The American Prospect (online only), Wednesday June 25, 2003, URL http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2003/06/franke-ruta-g-06-25.html:

At midnight tonight, voting will close in the first online Democratic presidential primary ever. The vote is being sponsored by the San Francisco-based liberal activist group MoveOn; an estimated 300,000 of the group's more than 1.4 million U.S. members are expected to cast online ballots. And by Friday, one clear winner will have emerged: MoveOn itself.

The primary was designed, according to MoveOn organizing director Zack Exley, to give the group's members a voice in the presidential nominating contest at a stage normally dominated by "pollsters, pundits and people who can write $2,000 checks." The online nominating contest requires that a candidate win 50 percent of the vote in the field of nine in order to get the endorsement of MoveOn's political action committee (PAC) and support from its vast, potentially lucrative network of small donors -- support that will very likely be worth millions and could come before the crucial second-quarter of presidential primary fundraising ends June 30.

It will be a very tough contest to win. Around 180,000 of MoveOn's members voted in a preliminary poll about whether or not to hold a primary contest, says Exley, and 96.4 percent of them voted for it. But in a straw poll conducted around the same time, no candidate was able to garner more than 30-something percent of the vote, according to a campaign operative. The top three vote getters then were former Gov. Howard Dean (D-Vt.), Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio). MoveOn has refused to publicly release the straw poll numbers or even the order in which the candidates finished.

"We purposely set the bar high," says Exley of the 50-percent threshold for this week's vote. "I think it would be really difficult to win."  [...]

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Dr Tom Round
BA (Hons), LLB (UQ), PhD (Griff)
Research Fellow, Key Centre for Ethics,
   Law, Justice and Governance (KCELJAG)
Room 1.10, Macrossan Building, Nathan Campus
Griffith University, Queensland [Australia] 4111
Ph:        (061 or 07) 3875 3817
Mobile:   0438 167 304
Fax:       (061 or 07) 3875 6634
E-mail:    T.Round@gu.edu.au
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