COMMENTARY

What's in a number?
By Morgen D'Arc
Maine Green Independent Party

	Morgen D'Arc Photo: Alan Kobrin / Green Party of Florida

When it comes to electoral politics, numbers are everything. The only reason to be in electoral politics: to run candidates and win. In the end, on election day, winning amounts to getting the highest number of votes.

Maine has partisan registration; people can register into any party that has qualified to be on the ballot. The Maine Green Independent Party (MGIP) is ballot-qualified with its own box that can be checked off on the state's green voter registration cards.

Any state Green party that is fortunate enough to attain ballot status in a state that has partisan registration has access to powerful tools and resources that can aid in achieving that winning number on election day.

Of those tools, the most powerful by far is Green voter registration. Registration numbers lead to the resources detailed in the following paragraphs. Not all states with partisan registration have exactly the same process, but consider the scenario of the MGIP.

The Maine Green Party regained ballot status in 1998 as the Maine Green Independent Party, losing its former name to a legal technicality while tied up in court at the time. However, all 3,437 registered members had been lost when the party lost ballot status in 1996. Once lost, it was necessary to start all over again from the beginning, from nothing.

By June of 2000, one and a half years after ballot status was regained in 1998, the party had 2,152 new registered Greens. At about that time the party hired a part-time contract employee and prioritized Green voter registration as part of the job. That employee and a few volunteers launched an energized and dynamic registration drive.

By fall 2000 the number of Green registered voters had climbed to 8,743. By Nov. 2001 it was 10,973, by June 2002 it was 13,272, by fall 2002 it was 16,169. By June 23, 2004, at the time of the Green Party national presidential nominating convention in Milwaukee, Wisc., the number was up to 19,150. The number for Nov. 2004 was not released until mid-summer 2005, bringing the MGIP to a spectacular total of 24,155! This from a population of only 1.2 million and a voting population of much less.

Maine now has more registered Greens per capita than any state in the country. Maine also has John Eder, the highest-ranking elected Green in the country, and Maine's largest city, Portland, has the second-highest number of Green officeholders on a school committee.

As mentioned earlier, registration is the tool that leads to valuable resources. In many states with partisan registration, the secretary of state's office tallies by state, county and town the number of registered party members. The state also tallies election results per party affiliation by state, county, town and even wards and precincts. These tallies can be used in many ways in developing party and campaign strategies and tactics. 

Reports of the tallies of registered voters in the media provide attention and interest. The higher the number, the more valuable the resource. The more important the Green Party becomes in the eyes of the public, the more credibility it has and the more the Green Party is taken seriously. 

But even greater resources are to be had through ever-increasing numbers of registered voters.

In Maine, as with other states, the state tax return has a check-off option to give a donation to the party of one's choice. The party gets thousands of dollars per year without doing anything except to be qualified on the ballot. The amount received by the MGIP each year has much to do with the numbers of Green registered voters-an incredible resource. In 2003 the MGIP received $7,655, the third year in a row Maine Greens received more than the Republican Party and only $2,512 less than the Democratic Party. Imagine that, considering they have more than 15 times the registered members than the MGIP and incomparably more wealth. 

For campaigns, the numbers of registered Green Party voters translate to valuable lists acquired from the town and state that can be used by candidates to get signatures to qualify for the ballot, to target potential voters, to raise campaign funds, to recruit for campaign committees and to recruit volunteers. Between campaigns, the party uses the lists to fundraise, to send mailings, to announce events and, again, to recruit volunteers. All of these uses are valuable as resources to help achieve the winning number of votes on election day for Green Party candidates.

Numbers are often perceived and experienced as boring and tedious. But the kinds of numbers referred to in this article can produce exciting, even intoxicating activities, events and results.

Register. Stay with it. And e-mail morgenizer@yahoo.com to tell her about it.

Morgen D'Arc has been on the State Steering Committee of the MGIP 2000-06, a delegate to the National Committee of the Green Party of the United States 2002-06, a candidate in 2002 for partisan office (15,000 votes) and was an early writer for Green Horizon Quarterly. She is co-founder and co-chair of the National Women's Caucus and a former member of the John Eder Support Committee. She lives in Portland, Maine in Eder's district.

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