Don’t Blame Them for Being Green

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 for 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 jump 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 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” in the midst of the tight vote count, Sorensen glared through her squarish glasses.

“We don’t have to apologize for anything,” the Granada Hills resident declared. “We have every democratic right to vote for whomever we want!”

They have no discernible leader, no Valley headquarters, barely any money and 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 they intend to ride into future races.

No matter that their precinct walking was hobbled when a batch of campaign materials arrived late. Or that the “corporate media,” as they call this newspaper and others, did not cover Green candidates with what they considered the proper gusto.

Even Nader’s failure 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 Donald Tollefson, 75, a retired divorce attorney from Encino, who led the precinct-walking effort before the Nov. 7 election.

Valley Group Has Met Since 1989

The Valley group started organizing a decade ago to help put the Green Party on the ballot in California. The Greens also are active on the Westside and 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, according to Faramarz Nabavi, 23, one of Nader’s two paid campaign organizers in Southern California.

Voter registration has certainly grown a tinge greener in the Valley. Four years ago, just 3,166 Greens were registered in the three congressional districts that make up most of the area. Party registration in the Valley this year grew 55% to 4,904 voters.

The Nader campaign also attracted support this year from other quarters, including independent voters. 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.

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 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 wins a majority, the one with the fewest votes is eliminated. The second choice listed by that candidate’s voters is then applied, until one contender reaps a majority.

System Allows for Second Choice

The system allows voters to support their favorite candidate--say, from the longshot third party--without worrying that their vote may help elect their least favorite one.

Back in the stuffy meeting room in Studio City, Van Nuys High School teacher and longtime Green Party member Charlie Wilken explained the voting system. Some of the members 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 rather than run by traditional parliamentary procedure--the Valley group agreed to form a committee on voting reform. The goal: to present a 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, blurred 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.”