Struggling Valley Greens Are Proud of Their Votes for Nader

Don’t bother calling Ceil Sorensen a spoiler.

At 79, she’s got a “Ralph Nader for President” button pinned to her baby blue sweater and fistfuls of pro-living wage and anti-sweatshop fliers--but not a shred of patience with any suggestion that her Green Party candidate robbed Democrat Al Gore of the crucial votes that would have ensured his victory. As the messy battle between Gore and Republican George W. Bush for Florida’s 25 electoral votes continues to spill from one court to another, an optimistic band of San Fernando Valley Greens--many of them elderly--trooped into a cramped side room at a Ventura Boulevard acting studio last week to plot the next moves in their grass-roots uprising.

When another member wondered aloud how Greens ought to fight “all this negative bashing we’ve been getting” over the unfathomably tight vote count, Sorensen glared through her squarish glasses.

“We don’t have to apologize for anything,” she said. “We have every democratic right to vote for whomever we want!”

They have no discernible leader, no Valley headquarters, barely any money and only about 25 hard-core members who regularly show up at meetings. But the Valley Greens, a polite bunch of graying lawyers, ponytailed teachers and other activists, say the Nader campaign energized their admittedly loosely run operation and built a momentum that they intend to ride into future races.

No matter that their precinct walking was hobbled when a batch of campaign literature arrived late. Or that the “corporate media,” as they call this newspaper and others, failed to cover Green candidates with what they considered the proper gusto.

Even Nader’s inability to win 5% of the popular vote nationwide--the threshold the Greens needed to qualify for federal election funds in 2004--was viewed as just an unfortunate bump in a long road toward building a progressive reform movement.

“The model of this campaign was: We’re doing the best we can,” said 75-year-old Donald Tollefson, a retired divorce attorney from Encino who led the precinct-walking effort.

The Valley group started organizing a decade ago to help put the Green Party on the ballot in California. The Greens are also active on the Westside, in Burbank, Agoura Hills and the Antelope Valley, as well as on various college campuses, including Cal State Northridge.

But only the Valley Greens have been meeting regularly since 1989, making them (in the precise wording typical of many a well-educated Green) “the longest continuously meeting group in Los Angeles County,” said Faramarz Nabavi, 23, one of Nader’s two paid campaign organizers in Southern California.

Voter registration certainly has grown a tinge greener in the Valley. Four years ago, there were just 3,166 Greens in the three congressional districts that make up most of the area. Party registration has climbed 55%, for a grand total of 4,904 voters here.

Of course the Nader campaign attracted support this year from many other quarters, including independents.

Almost 18,000 people voted for Nader in the Valley districts, out of about 518,000 who cast ballots, according to the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder’s office. That means Nader captured more than 3.4% of the Valley vote, compared with about 3% nationwide. Nader got 3.1% of the vote in Los Angeles County.

All of which establishes the Valley--nationally known for its decidedly un-Green transformation from open ranchland and orchards into a swarm of subdivisions and strip malls--as something of a modest Green refuge.

Many party members, here and across the country, were delighted with the presidential election’s outcome: a bizarre deadlock between the two major parties so complete that the Greens scarcely could have planned it more perfectly. What better time, they said, to launch a debate about how to hold fair elections?

“This is a historic opportunity for us,” said Santa Monica Councilman Michael Feinstein, a Green elected in 1996 on a nonpartisan ballot. “It’s totally to our advantage, and the longer it plays out, the more likely we will have a national dialogue on this question.”

One top Green priority, after all, is promoting electoral reform. Many Greens favor a system known as instant runoff voting, by which voters rank candidates in order of preference. A Nader voter, for example, might rate Gore or Bush as a second choice.

Then, if no candidate won a majority, the one with the fewest votes would be eliminated and the second choices listed by his voters counted as votes for those other candidates. And so on until one contender reaped a majority.

The system would allow voters to support their favorite candidate--say, the long-shot, third-party guy--without worrying that their vote might help elect their least favorite one.

In their stuffy meeting room in Studio City, longtime Green and Van Nuys High School teacher Charlie Wilken explained the voting system to his fellow members. Some of them were new to the party, drawn in by Nader’s anti-corporate, populist message. Others were veteran party activists, steeped in the environmentalism, social justice, nonviolence and feminism espoused by Greens worldwide.

“We have an opportunity now that we’ve never had,” Wilken said. “How many people do you know who said, ‘I love Nader, I’d like to vote for him, but blah, blah, blah.’ ”?

After a long discussion--Green meetings are based on consensus, not the more familiar all-in-favor-say-aye method--the Valley group agreed to form a committee on the matter. The goal: to present their proposal to the Los Angeles City Council.

As for the tug-of-war over the presidency, some Greens say they don’t care who wins. Echoing Nader, they protest that the distinctions between Republicans and Democrats have been largely lost, smeared together into one corporate party corrupted by the hunt for campaign contributions.

“The thing we won which was really exciting was this meltdown of the Republicrat system,” Wilken said gleefully. “This is our favorite subject.”